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Political dramas have never been quite my thing. The image I’ve had of them is about a bunch of grey bureaucrats having petty fights over office positions. Yet I did check out House of Cards for the good reviews it has gotten. Plus, I was interested in the supposedly cynical and realistic depiction of White House politics that the show seemed to offer. After two seasons my feelings are mixed: As the upside-down American flag in the show’s logo implies, HoC presents itself as a critical unraveling of what we liked to call “democracy”, putting shamelessly on display all the corruption and manipulative maneuvers politicians engage in. But, on the other hand, the show does not seem to be aware of its own ideological underpinnings and – paradoxically, perhaps – does not go deep enough in its critique of ideology.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Frank Underwood in the series poster – appropriately with blood on his hands

I

For those of you not familiar with the series, the story is about a Democrat congressman Frank Underwood (played by Kevin Spacey) who, after being denied the position of the Secretary of State, decides to go solo and starts acting on his plan to climb the ladder of power. He is supported by his wife Claire who is running a charity organization. As the story goes on, Frank gets ever more ruthless and pragmatic, ready to lie and to manipulate, to blackmail and even to kill journalists to cover his tracks. If Frank ever had any ideological commitments, it is clear that he’s lost them all, as he’s ready to sign any piece of legislature if it serves the purpose of advancing his career.

I won’t go into any further detail about the plot (see it for yourself!). From this rather short introduction it should be quite clear what “politics as usual” looks like for the creators of the show: the Congress consists of a group of self-interested and power-hungry representatives, ready to engage in tactical maneuvers to act on their motives and to sell themselves to lobbyists if the situation calls for it. It is a very cynical universe. If the ideology of democracy calls for politicians to represent and act on the will of the electorate, it is clear that this is not the vision House of Cards subscribes to.

The show seemingly has a very anti-ideological edge. As Randy Shaw explains in his piece on Huffington Post:

House of Cards portrays a political world where nobody (except perhaps the Tea Party) is driven by actual beliefs. That’s why its characters betray unions after winning their votes, environmental groups are shown making deals with corporate polluters, and reporters who actually believe in searching for “truth” are portrayed as hopeless knaves.

The White House is all about realpolitik. The only person in the series who makes an attempt to stand for the promises made to the electorate, Peter Russo, faces a gruesome end as Frank kills him and stages it as a suicide. His fate was essentially the same as that of naive and optimistic Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s “Idiot”. It is not ideology, which is the driving force behind politics. Only the most ruthless ones succeed in the game of power.

This cynical universe is what Margaret Canovan – modifying terms adopted from Oakeshott – calls the “pragmatic” aspect of democracy. According to this view, democracy is about an institutional framework, within which groups and individuals act according to their particular interests, form coalitions and try to build consensus via discussions and compromises. What this institutional framework does is to provide a space for peaceful reconciliation of conflictual interests in an era of mass communication and mass mobilization. Although Frank Underwood might be a ruthless egotist, his actions do not take place in an institutional vacuum. He might try to circumvent the rules but they are, nonetheless, there, and they limit what he can do. Sometimes he even takes advantage of the rules, as seen, for example, in the scene where he – in the position of the President of the Senate – delivers a motion called “call of the house” to compel absent Republican senators to be present at the Senate Chamber so that a quorum would be present.

Opposing the pragmatic aspect, we also have what Canovan calls the “redemptive” aspect of democracy. The redemptive side is all about the People (with a capital P). According to this view, democracy is simply another name for executing the Will of the People, and in this way it is able to bring salvation through politics. The redemptive aspect has an anti-representational side to it: democracy should be about people taking charge of their own lives directly and not being controlled by a bunch of bureaucrats, who conduct discussions in secret and engage in corruption. In fact – since it is the very ideology of democracy – this redemptive vision is what we hear all the time whenever we hear politicians and intellectuals praising democracy in public speeches. It is also what politicians rely on when they try to appeal to voters (“Vote for us, for we will make sure your voice is heard!”). House of Cards mocks this view of politics. We are all the time shown how the public appearance of politicians, their appeals to the electorate, contradicts their actual practices (secret to the public, of course). Frank Underwood is definitely not a singular exception but merely the pinnacle of this rule.

Canovan’s point is that we can’t have one without the other. Both aspects of democracy exist simultaneously side by side. As she says, pragmatic politics without the redemptive aspect is like keeping a church going without faith: a self-defeating process. When politics gets too complicated, too corrupted, too opaque, and too alienating to the public, the redemptive side is going to reassert itself with a vengeance. This is how Canovan understands populism. It is an inherent part of democracy, keeping the pragmatic part of it in check. Where we find populist parties winning ever larger shares of votes, we will also find a technocratic, corrupt and bureaucratic government, to which these parties are reacting. This seems not to be the case in House of Cards though. There appears to be not much redemptivist-populist agitation going on. In fact, the only close picture we get of political protesters in the show portrays them as fakes (they were quickly assembled together by a teachers’ union and were easily derailed by Frank). And anyone acting with such motives is doomed to a miserable failure.

II

Now, as I see it, there are two ways to interpret this cynical-realistic universe of House of Cards (that is, if you don’t want to accept it as it is). The first one is to say that it is a kind of criticism of contemporary politics. Nobody wants to live in a society where all that politicians do is acting according to their own self-interest. Nonetheless – and this is what House of Cards seems to be saying – that is the reality of our situation. There’s a kind of journalistic ethos going on here: the ultimate political act is to expose reality as it really is, without the veil of ideology.

One could find some support for this view in the fact that many of the “good guys” in the show are either journalists or hackers, both of whom pose a serious threat to Frank and the business of politics in general. Even Zoe Barnes – the nosy journalist from season 1 – who seemed to side with Frank for a moment turned out to be very dangerous to him in the end, so much so that he decided to kill her. Much of season 2 consists of Frank trying to stop two of Zoe’s journalist colleagues from uncovering his master plan, and he succeeds in this in the end. A depressing moment for journalism.

Zoe Barnes

In spite of these crushing defeats, the media is depicted as quite an omnipotent force in the show. Good PR is everything to these politicians. Make one mistake in your public appearance and your political career is over. Many of the battles between Frank and his antagonists are played in this very field. For example, during the teachers’ strike early on in the show, Frank was able to end the strike simply by staging a fist fight between him and the teachers’ union’s lobbyist Marty Spinella, ruining Marty’s media reputation. Frank also used this tactic to bring down Peter Russo by having him appear drunk on the radio.

Peter Russo

Not to underestimate the weight of Frank’s crimes and his certain demise if those crimes were exposed to the public, but I think the show is a bit too optimistic about the force of media. The problem today is not that we’re lacking information – especially after Wikileaks – but that we’re unmoved by it. Was the United States forced to cut back on its war operations after Wikileaks exposed the war crimes and all the collateral damage of American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan? Moreover, the conditions in Guantanamo Bay have been known even before Wikileaks and – after more than 10 years – the prison is still standing. But, you might say, how about the personal reputation of politicians? Couldn’t you at least take an individual person down by discrediting him or her publicly in the media? Well, as much as I would like to believe in that, I think the careers of people like Silvio Berlusconi prove otherwise. He’s been accused of illegal activities many times but has kept on returning to the political arena. Besides, we live in an era where politicians can even belittle and make fun of themselves in public (which makes me doubt whether political satire has lost the subversive core it might have once had).

But somehow I doubt that the creators of House of Cards are on a mission to expose the realpolitik of the White house in the hope that this might perhaps make us more critical of politics. The second interpretation would be that perhaps there’s really no agenda here. The world is fucked up and that’s it. Maybe the writers of the story are really just cynics and want to document reality as it is, without happy endings to please utopians and idealists. This would put the show to the same category as Game of Thrones – a series even more cynical than House of Cards. If we interpret the story this way it becomes a kind of an exposition of the egoistic nature of human beings and the corruptive effects of power and money.

III

The kind of a world presented in House of Cards (and Game of Thrones) is very tempting. There is something very alluring about the unveiling of appearances and getting to know the real motives behind the characters. Moreover, the appearance of cold hard realism is tempting; it’s a bittersweet pleasure to see the world in all its ugliness. But the alluring effect of shows like House of Cards should make us question why we’re drawn to the kind of realism presented in them. If we enjoy the show, it’s a sign that we’re ideologically engaged with it, that it caters to our fantasies about reality. In fact, the anti-ideological edge of House of cards is misleading, because it presents as reality the kind of a world that we find in the predominant liberal ideology, albeit in a dark guise.

What does the ideology of liberalism tell us? That we’re ultimately singular individuals acting on our own self-interests. Our actions might not be carefully considered and calculated (as the rational choice theory and game theory – commonly used in mainstream economics – suggest) but there is always a selfish motive behind them. Even if we seem to act altruistically, it can always be said that it’s only because we want to feel good about ourselves. From this singular self-interested actor we can then derive the values associated with classical liberalism and contemporary individualism, such as personal liberty, the individual’s right to freedom of action and self-expression.

It is, of course, possible to criticize the kind of views liberalism presents to us. It is possible to say, for instance, that we are not atomic selves but that our selfhood is constructed in our social relations and, therefore, that we’re social actors. Moreover, if you are psychoanalytically aligned, you could say that we’re, in fact, split subjects (the conscious and the unconscious). In this view the human being is characterized by antagonisms and contradictions. It is impossible to reduce actions merely to simple selfish motives because it’s in our nature that there is always a conflict of various motives. But this is not the place to advance a criticism of the liberal human being. My purpose was merely to show that the cold realism of House of Cards is alluring precisely because it appeals to the kind of ideological fantasies we’ve all been raised into.

Where do we find the symptoms of this liberal ideology in House of Cards? Putting the general outlook of the series aside for a moment, the most obvious sign for me is the lack of collective action/actors in the show. The closest we come to that is during the teachers’ strike early on in the show. But, as was already explain above, we don’t really get a good picture of the protesters. And the whole conflict was personified and resolved as a conflict between two individual people: Frank and Marty. Peter Russo’s rallying of the shipyard workers also died before it even begun and – again – in the form of Russo’s personal failure. There’s not even much party discipline in the show. Democrats are as eager to deceive each other as Republicans. Individual careerism is the only game in town.

Marty Spinella’s futile protest

Big business is also personified in the form of greedy lobbyists and businessmen (a story written from another perspective would have maybe shown them as disposable parts of bigger automatic machine called “capital” – an abstraction but a real one). However, it is to the benefit of the show that big business is such a huge presence in House of Cards. There are three constraints for political maneuvering in the show. The first is the law, the second is PR and the third is business. Politicians are shown to be not only dependent on lobbyists and in tightly knit relations with business people but also constrained by business interests in the range of decisions they can make and the kind of options they have on the table. This is especially relevant considering that the last 30-40 years in the United States and Europe have been a period of low investment (and, therefore, low growth) and the rise of global financialization – trends, which have increasingly limited the scope of governments’ policy options and increased public debts, therefore placing states at the mercy of their creditors (for a compelling account of this history, see Wolfgang Streeck’s “Buying Time”).

Another curious symptom of ideology at work in the show is the figure of the innocent president. Garrett Walker is quite a sympathetic figure. He doesn’t seem to be engaged in political scams and, together with his wife, is portrayed as a kind of a human figure with normal human problems (he goes to marriage counselling with his wife). Unfortunately, he is also easy to fool, as Frank constantly demonstrates throughout the series. This figure of the innocent president is not a singular peculiarity; it can be found in many other (American) TV series and movies. For example, in the latest season of 24, president James Heller expresses his anger for not having been told about a drone strike, which killed civilians somewhere in the Middle East. If my memory serves me right, he is given a perfect reply: in order to keep his hands clean, Heller shouldn’t be informed about such dirty activities happening on the ground. The point is clear: the president should be above realpolitik and saved from the dirty business of politics as usual. By the way, this is also the kind of a relationship, which Frank has with Garrett in House of Cards. Frank keeps serving Garrett (with his own hidden motives, of course) by ethically questionable tactics with Garrett’s discreet approval. He is OK with Frank’s methods, as long as he is kept in the dark.

Garrett Walker

Why is this figure of the innocent president a symptom of ideology? Once again, I need to refer to Žižek and his views on cynicism. For, according to him, total cynicism is impossible because the cynical worldview – that the world is cruel and full of egotists, etc. – is sustained by an object, which, as it were, remains ignorant and innocent. Žižek has many examples to illustrates this logic. One of them is the connection between the late 60’s sexual revolution and the figure of the innocent child. As we all know, the sexual revolution loosened up our moral standards, diversified sexualities considered pathological before and even lead to extremities, which remain controversial to this day. However, this development was coupled with another trend: the emergence of the figure of the innocent child. Whereas in psychoanalysis and during the times before the sexual revolution, children were considered sexual beings (Freud among others), in modern times children are extremely desexualized and the figure of the pedophile has become like an incarnation of Satan on earth. It is as if, even though sexuality is now perhaps more diverse and visible than ever, there has to remain an innocent gaze, someone who is not aware of what is happening – and this gaze is embodied in the figure of the innocent child. To take another example, from TV this time, there is a wonderful depiction of this same logic in the vampire series True Blood. Sookie’s (the protagonist) grandmother dies early on in the show but Sookie seems strangely unaffected by this, as if her beloved grandmother’s death didn’t have any emotional impact on her. However, the secret to her unaffected state of mind is soon revealed. Before she died, Sookie’s grandma had baked a pie. It is only when Sookie takes the pie out of the fridge and starts eating it that she breaks down in tears. The pie was a stand-in for her grandma; as long as the pie remained intact, the fact that the grandma was really dead hadn’t really hit Sookie on an affective level.

Going back to House of Cards, the figure of the innocent president is, I think, a stand-in for the purity of politics. As long as the head of the White House remains ignorant of it, realpolitik can go on. The cynical universe of House of Cards needs a character like Garrett Walker to sustain it; he is a symptom of the kind of an ideology House of Cards propagates. so what would have been the way out of this deadlock? I would say: go all the way! Attack the object, which sustains one’s ideology. In other words, deprive the president of his innocent status and portray him as a corrupt politician like everyone else, or, perhaps even better, as a person corrupted by his office and status. If the authors had done it that way, they would have rendered visible the corruptive nature of the political system as such. Now the show seems to sustain the illusion that politics would be different with different actors: remove the corrupted politicians and all would be fine.

IV

It’s time for a conclusion: House of Cards, in spite of its attractive cynicism and anti-ideological edge, remains caught in the ideological constraints of contemporary liberalism. Frank Underwood, far from exposing to the audience the real nature of politicians behind their democratic rhetoric (as if didn’t already know), complies just nicely with a) the figure of a liberal human being acting on his or her own self-interest and b) the image of politics as a play field of individual actors trying to climb the ladder of power, which, I think, is the dark underside of consensus politics. The latter, as explained above apropos Canovan, refers to the pragmatic view of democratic politics, which emphasizes the role of institutional constraints as peaceful containers and reconcilers of conflicts between adversaries with their own specific interests. The goal of these constraints and deliberative proceedings is, of course, to establish a consensus among all parties, therefore coming to a solution, which serves everyone involved. Of course, the implication of this is that the parties involved should be able to leave their particular interests aside and come to a compromise, which benefits all. Frank Underwood, although able to circumvent the rules and use them to his own advantage, exists solely within this ideology of consensus – as its dark shadow. He doesn’t stand for universality but particularity; his motive is not the universal interest but his own private one.

I do not think politics should be about reaching an agreement between adversaries. what this consensus view of politics hides is the irreconcilability of deep antagonisms, which constitute the society. Apropos class struggle, it is impossible to find lasting agreements between capitalists and the rest of the people (workers and the unemployed), for the very existence of the former depends on the exploitation of the latter. To take a very concrete example of this, during a time of crisis higher wages cannot be in the interests of capitalists because to raise wages is the same as to cut profits. Moreover, mass unemployment, especially if welfare programs and labor legislation are weak, actually benefits capitalists: it is a way for them to pressure people into accepting lower wages and poorer conditions of work. Welfare of the mass of people is not in essence aligned with the interests of capitalists, who are always forced to act on the basis of the profit motive.

What this exploitative relation between capitalists and the rest of the people also implies is the asymmetricity between their respective positions. Whereas the former stands for particularity, the latter stands for universality. The interests of capitalists are particular interests, only serving the class of capitalists, while the interests of the rest of the people stand for the universal interest of the demos, of people as such. The ideology of consensus politics implies the particular nature of the actors involved in the decision-making process, therefore obscuring, not only the antagonistic relations of the actors, but also the place of universality – for universality is not represented in the reached consensus but in the interests of one apparently particular party in the debate, the party standing for the people (as opposed to the capitalists).

So, if Frank Underwood is not the kind of a figure of a politician we need, what would be? I’m willing to take cue from Žižek, who has issued a call for a new master figure for the Left in the form of a Leftist Thatcher. As we all know, Margaret Thatcher was relentless in her attacks against the working class. Most famously, she was able to suppress the miners’ strike of 1984-85. Žižek attributes to her the ability to change the entire coordinates of political debate, transforming the way we talk about the economy and what is possible:

Margaret Thatcher, the lady who was not for turning, was such a Master, sticking to her decision which was at first perceived as crazy, gradually elevating her singular madness into an accepted norm. When Thatcher was asked about her greatest achievement, she promptly answered: “New Labour.” And she was right: her triumph was that even her political enemies adopted her basic economic policies – the true triumph is not the victory over the enemy, it occurs when the enemy itself starts to use your language, so that your ideas form the foundation of the entire field.

So, it would be interesting to decouple the particular egoistic motives of Frank Underwood and the relentlessness according to which he acts. Do we not need someone who is as determined as he is on our side? Do we not need someone who is able to push through our views without resulting in a weak compromise? Do we not need someone who would not accept the rules of the debate as given but have the debate on our terms instead? Iron determinacy and an uncompromising attitude are not necessarily bad features for a politicians to have. In fact, they are precisely the kind of features we should expect from a political figure who acts according to the interests of the people, or, in other words, the universal.

During the last few years cinema has been penetrated by class struggle in the form of “Hunger Games” and “Elysium”. The spectacle of visual effects in both of them has blasted on the screen the dire situation of rising inequality all around the world, a trend which is far from a red herring. The Korean film-maker Bong Joon-ho – who also brought us “The Host” and “Mother” among other movies – and his crew gave their contribution to the list and produced their own cinematic representation of class struggle in the form of “Snowpiercer”, possibly the best film of the year and definitely the most revolutionary one.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Poster, with Curtis on the front.

I

The film takes place in the near future when the earth has frozen up (making life impossible on earth) due to a failed experiment of climate engineering (large-scale manipulation of the atmosphere in an attempt to stop global warming). The remains of humanity are packed on a gigantic train called Snowpiercer, which circles around the globe with the power of a perpetual motion engine. The train is extremely stratified along class lines: the tail of the train is inhabited by poor rabble while wealthy elite take up the rest of the train. In a Marxist fashion, there exists a relation of exploitation, which sustains the class system: children of the inhabitants of the tail are frequently taken from their parents and brought to the front of the train (to work the train’s engine, as it is revealed later on).

The film follows a rebellion iniatiated by the tail inhabitants and lead by a man called Curtis. With their collective force they’re able to defeat the elite’s guardians and move towards the head of the train car by car with the aim of overthrowing the rule of Wilford, the creator of the train and the head of its social hierarchy. In addition to Curtis and Wilford, there are also some other characters whose roles are central to the story. One of them is Minister Mason, who acts as the representative of Wilford (and the elite as a whole) and commands the guardians. Another central character is Namgoong Minsu, a prisoner released by Curtis. He designed the security system of the train and Curtis persuades him to help the tail inhabitants advance towards the head. Curtis also has a mentor, an older man named Gilliam, who dies during the rebellion. As will be seen later on in a plot twist, he turns out to be a double-faced character who has been plotting behind Curtis’s back.

Curtis and his people facing the train’s police force.

Namgoong Minsu

The film is a showcase of Bong’s characteristic style of film-making. The physical setting of the story – the train with all its various cars – allow him to play out his genre-smashing and pace-shifting technique. The atmosphere of the movie keeps shifting as Curtis’s forces move through the train. The film starts from the decayed tail cars, creating a dystopian atmosphere, but quickly erupts into action as the revolt starts moving. After Curtis captures Mason, who he uses as a hostage and a guide to advance further to the prosperous cars of the elite, the film takes comedic turns and even has a surreal flavor to it, reminding me very vaguely of Godard’s “Weekend” and less vaguely of Gilliam’s “Brazil”. When we finally get to Wilford’s car at the front, the film has shifted its shape from a rather clearcut class struggle form into a multifaceted work of art and social critique.

II

The thematics of social stratification in this film shine through immediately in its visuals. The tail cars are dark, trashy, crowded, precisely the kind of a visual representation of deprivation one easily imagines. The tail’s poverty seems to culminate in disgusting protein bars, which serve as food in the tail (considering the popularity of protein snacks in the fitness boom nowadays, what an irony!). Later the tail inhabitants learn that the bars are actually made of insects that are being processed in one of the cars. In contrast to the tail, the cars reserved for the elite are clean, technologically advanced and filled with interior design. The film also drives home the point that fashion is a symbol and privilege of social status: whereas the tail inhabitants wear ragged clothes, Minister Mason looks like a judge from Project Runway.

Tail inhabitants, with Gilliam on the right.

Tyranny goes Gaga: Minister Mason

However, the immediate setting of social inequality is not what makes this movie progressive or revolutionary in its logic. What I will try to do in this text is to show the intrinsic Marxist framing of class struggle in the film, which sets it apart from similar movies. It is this framing, which challenges the audience to think about revolution in ways movies like Elysium never could. The analysis that follows is going to focus on two points. First, the role of ideology in legitimizing class hierarchy (or what is called the spirit of capitalism in the Weberian tradition of sociology). And second, the anti-systemic logic of the ending twist (watch out for spoilers!).

i) There is another benefit in the train setting than just allowing Bong to play freely with his approach to film-making, it also allows Bong to show glimpses of contemporary Western capitalist societies in a kind of satirical light (the train’s society is, of course, not capitalist, but it is fairly obvious what it’s supposed to represent). As the tail inhabitants march towards the front of the train, we get to see all sorts of facilities and places of leisure provided for the elite. The classroom car is especially memorable as it embodies in an almost embarrassingly straightforward form the orthodox Marxist account of how ideology operates: ideology is a veil covering, legitimizing and naturalizing the class hierarchy and relations of production, obfuscating the true nature of the society for its inhabitants. The classroom car is a satire of school as an ideological state apparatus: children are being indoctrinated to comply to the social order of the train by a ridiculous ideological song about Wilford and the sublime properties of the train’s perpetual motion engine.

Education or indoctrination?

There’s also a materialist philosophy of religion at play in Bong’s movie. In the beginning of the film Minister Mason gives a lecture to the tail inhabitants who have been showing signs of disobedience where she speaks of Wilford and the train’s engine as holy beings, elevating them to a god-like position. I was immediately reminded of something I read in Chris Harman’s People’s History of the World where he notes that in pre-historic societies granaries and other systems of distributing food and resources in the society were commonly elevated to the status of religious worship along with their guardians. In Snowpiercer the perpetual motion engine is what keeps the train moving and all its inhabitants alive, i.e. it is the material basis for the reproduction of the train’s society. Is it not natural for such an object to be mystified in a religious vein? And doesn’t this elevate the engine’s creator to the status of a god?

As we know from the critics of orthodox Marxism, the conception of ideology as a veil covering up the true relations of domination and exploitation in the society – while there’s truth to it – does not quite capture all the ways ideology operates and is linked with the economic conditions and relations of the society. A range of thinkers from Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello to Slavoj Žižek have noted how ideology is not just some kind of a discourse or a rhetorical trick to fool the oppressed into submission, it is also a structuring principle of social reality in itself; ideology is not just a way to legitimate the actually existing social order, it also helps to bring this social order about. For example, Žižek understands ideology as a set of unconscious beliefs, which we follow in our daily actions. The mystery of beliefs is in the way they work seemingly without anyone actually doing the believing. Žižek likes to illustrate this in connection with the Marxist notion of commodity fetishism: Nobody actually believes that the stupid paper bills in my pocket are valuable as plain physical objects but, nonetheless, they will accept them as means of payment as if they had some magical properties, which make them valuable and allow them to serve as money. In this sense ideology is not in what we believe but in what we actually do.

But this is a digression. What I wanted to show here is that Snowpiercer employes very consciously the orthodox notion of ideology as a veil obfuscating the true nature of the society. It’s a very simple satire but serves to remind us that contemporary capitalist socities are far from post-ideological. Ideology is very much alive and kicking, even if we would better off to resort to the likes of Žižek rather than orthodox Marxists in order to understand how we’re being persuaded and bribed to submit to the imperatives of our economic system.

ii) The Marxist punch proper only appears in the very end of the movie. Curtis, Minsu and his daughter finally get to the front car, the home of Wilford and the location of the perpetual motion engine. Curtis is finally going to execute his plan: to overthrow Wilford’s rule and take control of the engine. Minsu, however, has other plans. He wants to blow up the door next to the front car, which leads to outside of the train. His intention is to abandon the train and live outside, on land, in the hopes that the earth’s climate has warmed up enough to sustain life. What is at stake in the choice between these two options? Who should we side with? Let’s examine these questions in the light of the course of events the film takes.

Wilford meets Curtis with a very unpleasant surprise: he had planned everything all along. As he explains to Curtis, the train has a very delicate eco-system, which is founded on maintaining the hierachical social order of the train. As this balance is disturbed, measures have to be taken in order to establish harmony once again. At this point, the population of the tail had grown too large. It needed to be cut down drastically: precisely 74% of the tail inhabitants had to die for the sake of restoring the train’s eco-system. In a kind of trade-off, Wilford’s intention was to let the rebellion advance a few cars further from the tail and stop there. This was planned together with Gilliam, Curtis’s mentor, who is now revealed to be one of the bad guys.

Curtis also learns what the children kidnapped from the tail inhabitants are being used for: the perpetual motion engine is sustained by child labor. Bong plays out an incredibly effective contrast here. Wilford’s car is beautifully decorated, even if slightly anemic, while the engine appears on the background like a sublime relic from ancient times. However, one only needs to remove one of the floor plates to expose the horror that keeps the place from falling apart: one of the children is being kept in a very tiny place in the middle of complicated machinery beneath the floor. The sight of exploitation is being kept at bay by only a thin layer of floor plates.

Wilford and the perpetual motion engine.

Underneath the floor…

To add insult to injury, Wilford crowns his master plan by telling Curtis that he wants to make him the new head of the train. Wilford is getting old and is in need of a replacement and he thinks Curtis is up for the job. Curtis is now faced with a very strange dilemma. What he thought he needed to fight for is being offered to him on a plate. The horror of this confrontation is that he is completely at a loss as to what to do. He thought he was fighting against the elite’s greed and Wilford’s lust for power. What he intended to do after overthrowing Wilford was to lead the train’s society differently, in an equal and democratic vein, without exploitation and oppression. But now – having been informed by the inevitability of social inequality – he can’t see any other options than turning into another Wilford, as despotic and as cruel.

It could be said that Bong shows here how even class struggle itself can be incorporated into the capitalist social order. The working class is kept at bay by reformist bribes, which will keep them calm and satisfied, while relations of domination and exploitation continue to exist. However, I think Bong’s point goes a little bit further than this and ends on an optimistic note. What Snowpiercer does is invoking the old line from Marx from his The Civil War in France: “[T]he working class cannot simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (The First International and After, p. 206) The tail inhabitants cannot simply march in to Wilford’s car, take the power to their own hands and establish a just social order. The (eco-)system by which the train operates is inherently unjust regardless of who pretends to rule it; there’s no other way to keep the engine alive and the train’s (eco-)system in balance than by domination and exploitation. This is the hard lesson in revolution Curtis faces.

It is hard not to see the analogy with present day capitalism. The train’s perpetual motion engine bears too much resemblence to capital that it cannot be a coincidence. What is capital – the self-propelling movement of money for the sake of making more money, production for the sake of expanding production, consumption for the sake of consumption – if not a perpetual motion engine, which feeds on human lives? And doesn’t Wilford’s cruel calculation – 74% – of the required loss of human lives resemble the quantitative logic of present day austerity with its reductions in public spending and cuts in labor costs? What Snowpiercer challenges us to think about is this: What if austerity is just a consequence of the logic of the capitalist system as such? What if austerity is the best capitalism can offer?

So, what’s the way out? Bong seems to credit Minsu with an answer: the goal is not to take power within the current system but to abandon the whole system as such. In the end the door to outside is blown up open and the train goes off the rails. Only two kids are left alive. They wonder outside the train and see a polar bear walking on the snow. It’s a proof that the earth’s climate has become inhabitable again and there’s life outside the train. In spite of the collapse of the train, it is a profoundly optimistic ending; another kind of a society is possible, but the hard lesson in revolution is that it will require overthrowing the entire system.

III

What’s the meaning of politics in Snowpiercer? The film essentially culminates in a very anti-systemic and revolutionary view of politics: politics is the collective resistance to oppression inherent in the system as a totality. However, there’s another opposition at play in the film, which can be approached from the perspective of Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of politics, laid down in his Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. The crux of his argument is that politics begins when oppressed and marginalized groups render themselves visible in the public arena, posit themselves as beings equal to everyone else and identify themselves with the totality of the society/social system. In politics the notion of equality disrupts/displaces the established social order.

Rancière contrasts politics with what he calls the Police. This doesn’t refer to actual police forces but to the ideologico-institutional social order, which assigns every individual to his or her proper place in the society. This can be conceived through social roles, which can be professions, gender roles, etc. (such as “woman”, “man”, “father”, “mother”, “teacher”, “student”). The Police reduces society to its individual parts, leaving no residual. It is the proper functioning of its individual parts, according the logic of the Police, which sustains the smooth running of the society and guarantees social harmony. For Rancière, the notion of “consensual democracy” is a system of this kind: it reduces the society to its individual parts (demographic groups, professions, special-interest groups, identity groups, etc.) and attempts to reconcile all the various interests of these individual parts into a coherent whole (for example, by parliamentary forms of governance and decision-making). In Snowpiercer, Wilford also obeys the logic of the Police. But his view of society is not consensual democratic but social darwinist: the train forms a delicate eco-system, in which every social group and individual has its proper place, the displacement of which results in disruptions in the eco-system.

In opposition to the Police, politics proper disrupts/displaces the established ideologico-institutional formation. Real democracy begins when an oppressed and marginalized group, which doesn’t have a place in the society, asserts itself on a political arena, declares itself equal to everyone else and identifies itself with the totality of the society/social system. Politics emerges precisely from the above mentioned residual, which isn’t supposed to exist in the calculations of the Police. For Rancière, the paradigmatic examples are proletarians (the working class) and women. Proletarians, as we know from Marx, do not have a place in the bourgeois social order. In contrast to the bourgeois fantasy of equal individuals making free decisions and contracts in the market, the capitalist social order is actually penetrated by class inequality: the class of owners of the means of production exploit the class of proletarians, who do not possess anything but their own labor-power, which they are forced to sell to their employers. As for women, what makes feminists political in the Rancièrean sense is their non-identification with the gender role they’ve been assigned to; a feminist will not accept the role of, for example, a submissive domestic housewife assigned to her by conservative ideologies but demands equality. In Snowpiercer, politics encapsulates in the struggle of the tail inhabitants against the place assigned to them by Wilford and his crew.

Rancière warns us about the temptation to conceive of politics as reconciliation of various interests achieved by rational discussion (à la Jürgen Habermas). Before any discussion can take place, social groups have to be constituted as legitimate parties in the discussion. It is here, on a level below reconciliation of interests by rational discussion, where politics takes place. It is the struggle of a social group to constitute itself as a party in the discussion. It is only after this has taken place when their demands can be recognized and conceived, not dismissed as incomprehensible noise (take the common image of a protester spouting meaningless nonsense). What Snowpiercer warns us about, in a Rancièrean vein, is the conception of politics as technocratic governance of the society, especially its economic system. Technocracy reduces politics to the management of economic policy by “experts” and limits our options to austerity and regulation of interest rates. As Marx reminds us, the governance of our economic system is always a political question.

Snowpiercer also rejects another Police logic, one that is perhaps more ideological, namely the logic of social darwinism (or, if you prefer a similar demographic version of the doctrine, Malthusianism). The usual formulation of this “theory” goes something like this: Social darwinism – ridiculously popular on discussion forums on the internet – reduces the society to the struggle of individuals for survival. The logic of the survival of the fittest is not only a gross distortion of the actual science of evolution but also a way to naturalize all the inequalities we perceive in our society. Poverty becomes a weakness of character, the result of natural incompetence and failure in the struggle for survival. Social darwinism – in spite of its cynicism – is a theory of social harmony: every individual is assigned to his or her place by the logic of survival while the society appears to form an eco-system where the strong succeed at the expense of the weak. Inequalities get naturalized and grounded in bad genes. The falsity of this logic is apparent to every social scientist. We don’t live in a state of nature (an imaginary construct if there ever was one) where the struggle for survival is supposed to take place but in a society dominated by the logic of class relations and other social systems, all of which are historically contingent and subject to change.

My last post looked into the issue of hikikomori, or socially withdrawn young people, from the perspective of mental illness and psychopathology. Along those lines the phenomenon of withdrawal from social life was depicted as a multiple of cases of deranged individuals suffering from this or that brand of mental disorder (commonly depression, anxiety and social phobia) and having failed to go through a healthy process of psychological development (often due to dysfunctional family relations). While I do not want to discredit the psychological approach, I do think it needs to be supplemented by a more social approach, which looks into the economic and cultural context of the phenomenon. Is there something in the contemporary late capitalist society, especially in Japan where the phenomenon is understood to be the most prevalent, which is causing many young people to withdraw to their rooms and cut ties to their peers and family as well as social institutions in general?

I

One must begin the enquiry by looking at the development of the capitalist economy in general in developed countries during the last few decades. From the turning point of late 60’s and early 70’s, capitalism (in developed countries at least) has entered a long period of low economic growth. The causes and dynamics of economic growth and cycles do not concern us here. What will be of interest to us, however, are the social consequences of such economic downturns. Low growth is characterized by a low rate of investment in the private sector, which in its turn implies a rise in the rate of unemployment. This has indeed been the case as unemployment has become more prevalent since the 70’s. (For a detailed examination of this process in the case of the US, see Kliman 2011.)

What does this mean for the younger population? The rate of unemployment among young people is generally higher than the average rate for the whole population. Moreover, the trends in the employment rate of young people are more sensitive to general economic trends than is the employment rate of the whole population. Consequently one can observe a general rise in the rate of unemployment among young people in most developed countries from the 70’s onwards. The rates are, of course, fluctuating and not all countries have gone through the same sort of development but the general conclusion to be drawn is the following: young people are less likely to find work now than decades ago. (Furlong & Cartmel 2007.)

The rise in the rate of unemployment has been accompanied by an increase in the prevalence of part-time jobs, contractual working periods, etc. Not only is it more difficult for young people to find work, it’s also more difficult to find a job that is stable and provides regular working hours. (Furlong & Cartmel 2007.) Now, part-time work is not necessarily a bad thing, but one should not overlook the danger of underemployment: simply having a job does not guarantee that it pays you enough to cover the costs of your living. Moreover, the uncertainty that comes with irregular work can be as hard to deal with as low pay, as it generates a lot of anxiety and stress for the working subject. A precarious worker can’t plan his or her future, rely on accumulated benefits that come with a stable job, or lead a stress-free life that comes with knowing that you won’t be losing your income anytime soon. (For an examination of the uncertain lives of young working-class people in the US, see Silva 2013.)

Another trend that has been accompanying low economic growth is that of so called de-industrialization. During the last decades the industrial manufacturing sector has been shrinking in developed countries, which is reflected in the growth of the so called service sector (which includes work in restaurants, hotels, etc.). This sector is notorious for providing its (often young) employees with minimum wages, irregular working hours and poor working conditions. Moreover, de-industrialization has diminished the supply of jobs requiring a low level of education. Whereas in the 50’s or 60’s young working-class people could be expected to leave school early, find a job already in their late teens and get married as fast as they leave their parental homes, the contemporary era has brought along with it an increase in the length of time spent in education. Enrolling in higher education has become increasingly popular among young people, most significantly among young women whose portion of all university students has grown larger than that of men’s. (Furlong & Cartmel 2007.)

It should be noted here that, in spite of the general nature of these changes, not all young people have experienced them in the same way. One’s socioeconomic or class background still has a part to play in the later outcomes of one’s life. Young people from working-class families are still less likely to be enrolled in universities and more likely to find themselves unemployed than their more privileged counterparts. One should also make certain specifications along gender lines. The opening up of higher education to women has certainly helped to promote the independence of women in spite of the inequality that prevails between socioeconomic classes. (Furlong & Cartmel 2007.) One can, of course, extend these distinctions to questions of race, etc. but, for the purposes of this text, I’ll just leave it here.

II

Since social withdrawal has become such a large issue in Japan (even if the phenomenon is not as prevalent as the general moral panic would have it, it’s a big issue at least judging by the attention given to it in the Japanese public discourse and media), it’s worthwhile to place it in the context of economic changes that have taken place in Japan from the early 90’s onwards when the prevalence of social withdrawal is commonly believed to have “exploded”. In fact, as shall be shown, there are good reasons to believe that the economic changes brought about by the depression beginning from the early 90’s have contributed to the rise of young people secluding themselves in their homes.

The changes that have taken place in Western economies have been somewhat delayed in the case of Japan. Up until the late 80’s Japan has been a country of low unemployment and high public investment. Jobs were generated in the industrial sector of the economy and public spenditure on infrastructure projects. As with all periods of growth in the capitalist economy, this one was not meant to last either. The economic boom of this decode was accompanied by a consistent rise in land prices and stocks – a bubble doomed to burst sooner or later. This in fact happened during the late 80’s and early 90’s, resulting in a period of economic stagnation. (Harvey 2011; Suzuki et al. 2010.)

The stagnation brought with it a general rise in the rate of unemployment. Young people especially have been affected by this. Between 1990 and 2004, unemployment among 15-19 yeard old males increased from 8% to 12% while unemployment among females in the same category increased from 5% to 11%. Moreover, the jobs offered to high school graduates have diminished from the early 90’s onwards. Whereas, in the early 90’s, about 1,7 million job offers were made to high school graduates, in 2003 this figure had fallen to just 0,2 million. The rise of unemployment was accompanied by the rise of the so called “freeter” category, which comprises people working in precarious conditions (part-time jobs, freelance, temporary work, etc.). During the period 1992-2002, the number of freeters (who have left education) aged 15-19 doubled in the case of males and more than doubled in the case of females. Among 20-24 year olds the number also doubled during the same period. (All these figures are taken from Furlong 2008.)

In order to assess the social impacts of these figures, one must examine the structures of the Japanese employment and social security systems. Japan is quite unique compared to its industrialized Western counterparts. Whereas many Western welfare states offer more or less extensive monetary benefits and public services to their citizens, in Japan social security is very much tied to the benefits offered by private companies to their employees. Firstly, in Japan the so called seniority wage system prevails: the level of one’s wage depends on the time being employed in the same company. Whereas in Western countries the wages of male production workers stop rising from the age 21-24 onwards, in Japan wages rise continuously up until the age range of 45-49. In addition to this, companies offer the families of their employees all sorts of other benefits from family allowances to housing. All of this has been premised on the idea of life-long employment: companies offered their employees life-long contracts and expected loyalty from their employees in return (a fact, which has contributed to notoriously long working hours). (Suzuki et al. 2010.)

As the Japanese welfare society has been so centered on private companies, the public welfare system has been left undeveloped. One can immediately see the consequences of economic stagnation on the well-being of the population: as the private sector goes bust and the public social security system is weak, the conditions of life of the population are bound to deteriorate – rapidly. In fact, it has been argued that, whereas Western countries have had time to adapt to post-growth late capitalism, Japan went through these changes much too quickly (Suzuki et al. 2010).

Another aspect of the Japanese society, which deserves attention, is the rigidity of the employment system. In Japan there exists a great divide between the “core workers” of companies (i.e. those working full hours and employed for long periods of time) and the freeters. The transition from the latter to the former is difficult due to both, the stagnating economy and the inflexibility of the hiring practices of companies. Newly graduated students expect to get hired in Spring (hiring annually takes place in April) while employment opportunities are generally worse for the rest of the year, except for the case of part-time and temporary jobs. Moreover, companies and schools have strong ties to each other, strengthening the link of one’s school and employment opportunities (a fact, which contributes to hardened competition between students for places in higher education). All of this has made transitions from education to proper employment very rigid: periods of “drifting” (time spent on exploring various jobs, education opportunities, etc.), common for young people in Western societies, are simply not in any sense ideal for young people in Japan. Once you drop out of the pipeline, it’s hard to get back in. (Furlong 2008; Suzuki et al. 2010.)

In the light of all this one expects to see a process of polarization in Japan. As the economy stagnates, as the private sector fails to provide the jobs and benefits, as the public safety net is weak and as the pipeline system still prevails, there is bound to be an increasing gap between those who have managed to secure their employment and those doomed to the precariousness of living on the edges of the labor market.

III

So what does this all have to do with social withdrawal? It’s simple to understand social withdrawal as a disillusioned reaction to the diminished opportunities of employment: why bother trying to find a job when the chances of getting a good one are so poor? Better to lock yourself in your room and live off your parents’ money. Indeed, it is possible to see withdrawal as a kind of a rational choice. Trying to earn your living by jumping from one part-time job to the next is simply a poor option compared to the financial security that comes with dependency on one’s parents.

Yet, seeing social withdrawal purely in the light of the changing demand for labor is too simplistic and challenged by the fact that the employment history of socially withdrawn youth (SWY) is generally not quite extensive and there’s very little research literature (at least in English) that would investigate the work attitudes of socially withdrawn people. A study by Kondo et al. (2013) found that about 50% of the participants in their study had any sort of work history (experience of part-time jobs was more common than having been permanently employed). Now, these numbers might be expected from a group, which is disillusioned with finding work, but, on the other hand, they could also be indicating the opposite, namely that SWY have had only little presence in the labor market and that the period of withdrawal has started already before the pressure of finding work became acute.

In order to understand the connection between social withdrawal and diminished job opportunities I think it would be useful to approach the matter in the context of so called youth transitions, which refer to the ways young people move or “transition” from one life situation to the next. Often the concept is applied in the sense of transitioning to adulthood. The crucial question is then the following: in a given social context, what does it mean for a young person to become an adult and how is this mediated by social institutions? Moreover, the question of finding work is contextualized here: employment mediates youth transitions and often serves as a marker for the beginning of adulthood. However – and here comes the limiting aspect – employment is not the only aspect of transitioning to adulthood. In the case of social withdrawal this means that while diminished job opportunities might not explain all of the withdrawal cases, they should nonetheless be included in the list of various factors that come into play in explaining the phenomenon.

Youth transitions have generally been mediated by movements from education to employment and from dependency on one’s parents to finding one’s own place to live, getting married and establishing a family of one’s own. This “traditional” path to adulthood is very role-based; you become an adult by adapting to the social roles enumerated above (finding a job, getting married, etc.). It gives you a clear symbolic mapping as to what it means to grow up. Many sociologists have, however, claimed that during the last few decades there has been a shift from formulaic youth transitions of this kind to more individualized transitions. As the economy has been changing, as higher education has been increasing in popularity and as the culture of individualism has prevailed, young people have increasingly exercised their own freedom of choice in choosing their own lives and, consequently, youth transitions have derailed from traditional paths and become more complex. (France 2007; Furlong & Cartmel 2007; Henderson et al. 2007.)

Yet, before celebrating Western individualism, it should be added that this view is certainly exaggerated. Factors such as one’s class background, gender and ethnicity remain powerful predictors of later outcomes in life, therefore restricting the thesis that individuals have more room for their own individual choices (Furlong & Cartmel 2007). Moreover, traditional life goals, such as getting married or finding a good stable job, are still to be found in the dreams and plans of young people (Henderson et al. 2007). Perhaps it should rather be said that traditional youth transitions have been shaken during the last few decades due to economic turmoil and the changes that have taken place in the field of education? From this point of view the situation looks more bleak: secure well-paying jobs, and the the things sustained by it, such as getting married or starting a family, are escaping from the reach of young people. Late capitalism is unable to serve as an economic foundation for traditional life paths. (Silva 2013.)

If social withdrawal can be understood as a social symptom of shaken youth transitions – the clash between traditional life goals and diminished opportunities to reach them – Japan seems like a good breeding ground for hikikomori. In spite of the social changes that have taken place in Japan since the early 90’s, young Japanese people still expect/are expected to comply to traditional cultural roles of adulthood, arguably with much more pressure than their counterparts in the West. The role of a well-earning and securely employed breadwinner is placed on young men while women are expected to withdrawn to their domestic role as housewives. Moreover, Japanese parents tend to place high pressure on their children to succeed academically. (Dziensinski 2005; Norasakkunkit et al. 2012; Rosenthal & Zimmerman 2013; Zielenziger 2006.) It is understandable that all these pressures, whether placed on a young person externally or internally, can become overbearing to the point of resulting in social withdrawal, especially if one doesn’t have a chance of living up to all of these expectations.

IV

There also exists another type of discourse, which attempts to explain social withdrawal in terms of a conflict between collectivism and individualism. This is argued most comprehensively by Michael Zielenziger, a journalist who has lived in Japan for many years and wrote a book about contemporary problems in the Japanese society, placing emphasis on the phenomenon of hikikomori. According to this argument social withdrawal is the result of the pressures of Japanese collectivism: individuals are forced to repress their own needs and desires in order to comply to all sorts of normative expectations imposed on them. As a result the gap between one’s public and private persona widens and the latter is repressed at the expense of the former. As the possibility of expressing oneself or living one’s life as one chooses is denied, young people withdraw from social life. (Zielenziger 2006.)

This same story is told by Hattori (2005) from a clinical psychiatric perspective. According to him, SWY tend to develop dissociative personalities as a result of constant oppression and repression in their childhood and adolescence. In other words, they put up a mask, a public appearance, in order to please others and comply to their expectations. As a flipside of this coin, they also tend to believe that others are doing this as well, which obviously generates a lot of distrust towards other people. The healing process, according to Hattori, consists of trying to re-establish a connection between the patient and his or her “real self”, therefore allowing him or her to lead an independent life free of self-denial.

The presumed Confucian collectivism of the Japanese people has generated a lot of comparative studies of the Japanese people, that is to say their beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. Zielenziger draws some of these studies to support his claims, showing among other things that the Japanese are more prone than their Westerns counterparts to place more emphasis on the context and to distrust strangers while maintaining loyalty to their in-group. Yet others have pointed out that studies have consistently failed to find any significant collectivistic traits in the Japanese people (except in the case of non-verbal measurements such as reaction times, etc.). In fact, young Japanese people tend to entertain highly individualistic attitudes (centered on individual choice, self-improvement, etc.). (Norasakkunkit et al. 2012.) This has lead some to describe Confucian collectivism as an “invented tradition”, which was mobilized for the benefit of Japanese companies – a particular Japanese brand of “the spirit of capitalism”, if you will (Suzuki et al. 2010).

Whether the Japanese really are more collectivistic than Western people or not, that is how young Japanese people tend to perceive the society around them. In studies it has been found that, while young Japanese people ascribe to themselves highly individualistic traits, they see that the Japanese society values collectivism instead of individualism, interdependence instead of independence. That is to say, in their own private experience, their own values are in conflict with the prevalent values of the society. (Norasakkunkit et al. 2012.) The SWY interviewed by Zielenziger seem to bear out this claim. They felt trapped in a society, which doesn’t allow them to be who they really are (or at least that’s how Zielenziger frames his interviews). If only Japan wasn’t such an uptight conservative country and valued Western individualism instead, the hikikomori wouldn’t be such a big social problem!

V

There’s one really obvious problem with these kind of arguments: if social withdrawal is really a symptom of Japanese collectivism, how come young people are withdrawing also in the West? Moreover, as Norasakkunkit et al. (2012) point out, while SWY and young people from marginal positions do not tend to value interdependence (collectivistic values), they do not score high on valuing independence (individualistic values) either. Perhaps, then, the problem is to be found in individualism as such? This might also help to explain why young people withdraw in Western countries, which are presumably more individualistic than Japan.

Alain Ehrenberg has studied the pathologies of Western individualism extensively. Tracking the history of depression, its symptoms and clinical image, Ehrenberg (2010) depicts depression as a flip-side of individualism. Whereas the individualistic subject has reconciled with his or her own true self, the depressed subject isn’t capable of identifying himself. Whereas the individualistic subject is capable of choosing his or her own life, initiating autonomous action and taking individual responsibility for it, the depressed subject suffers from feelings of inadequacy and is inhibited or uncontrollable in his or her action. The weight of responsibility becomes overbearing. The picture of a modern-day depressed client is the mirror-image of the type of an autonomous individual offered to us by the culture of individualism.

How does the contemporary depressed subject come into being? Ehrenberg draws from psychoanalysis and claims that what we’re seeing here is the result of a shift from the pathology of identification to the pathology of identity. In the first half of the 20th century neurosis dominated the picture: the mentally disturbed client harbored guilt for not being able to adapt to the roles assigned to him or her. The patient was haunted by internalized restrictions. The idea was that the neurotic subject held desires that were forbidden to him or her and resulted in psychic conflict, the symptoms of which could manifest as sadness, obsession or anxiety. However, when we come to the latter half of the century, a new type of a patient entered the picture: a subject who couldn’t free himself from constant loss and lived in a permanent state of inferiority and impotence. He or she could not identify himself and suffered from chronic depression. Whereas the neurotic subject suffered from psychic conflicts, the new depressed subject couldn’t articulate his or her psychic turmoil and suffered from deficits.

Ehrenberg describes a shift from the guilt-inducing Superego to the shame-inducing Ego Ideal:

These pathologies were called “narcissistic”. This narcissism was not that love of self that was one of the products of joie de vivre but, rather, the experience of being captive to a self-image so idealized that it led to impotence and paralyzed the individual, who had a constant need to be reassured by others and could easily becomes dependent on them […] The psychoanalysts had a tool to define their pathology, which was the Ego Ideal. The phenomenon was defined variously in Freud’s thought, but we could say schematically that it was linked to narcissism just as the Superego was linked to the forbidden: the feeling of inferiority was to the first what the feeling of guilt was to the second. In fact, if the Superego told one not to do, the Ego Ideal urged one to do.

In narcissistic pathologies, the Ego was so invested that any frustration was hard to endure. The patient never derived any satisfaction from her impulses; she felt empty and reacted aggressively, impulsively or by acting out. If the neurotic was defined by her psychic conflict, the borderline personality was not able to enter into conflict: she was empty. (pp. 126-127)

Individualism endorses permissiveness and encourages one to choose one’s own life regardless of any social expectations (that is to say, for example, that if you’re a woman, you are by no means doomed to conform to the traditional roles of femininity but that you can become a self-made individual). Yet the diminishing impact of the symbolic realm also robs the subject of any means by which to identify him/herself. To put it in psychoanalytic terms:

In this case the conflicts were pre-Oedipean. That indicated that these patients had stalled at a stage preceding their identification with parental images, which were the first objects presented to them. The patient had remained at a phase where he was still one with the mother. If neurosis was a pathology of identification, then the borderline condition, because the individual had not been able to develop relationships with objects, was a pathology of identity. Indeed, he had great difficulty identifying himself. He was, one might say, his own impotent sovereign[.] (pp. 125-126)

To sum it up: individualism is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, we’re allowed to be whoever we want and act according to our desires unconstrained by traditional social roles. We’re allowed to make our own individual choices, to choose the paths of our own lives. This is the liberating aspect of it. On the other hand, individualism does not present us with any means by which we could identify who we are while, at the same time, urging us to act on our true desires. This repressive aspect of individualism makes us feel ashamed for failing to live up to the idealized self-image furnished by a culture, which attributes success to and expects it from autonomous individuals.

VI

Why do I dwell on this dialectic of individualism and depression? Well, because it comes really close to how Saitō (2013), a popular psychiatric authority on issues related to hikikomori, understands social withdrawal. Like Ehrenberg, Saitō draws from psychoanalysis and explains withdrawal as a consequence of delayed symbolic castration:

In psychoanalysis, the concept of castration is extremely important. Why is that? Because castration has to do with the growth of all people, regardless of whether they are biologically male or female. In psychoanalysis, the penis is used as a symbol for what is almighty and can do anything. As children grow, they are forced to recognize through their interactions with other people that they are not all-powerful, almighty beings. The act of giving up on the notion that one is almighty and powerful is called “castration” by psychiatrists.

It is by realizing that one is not all-powerful and omnipotent that one develops the need for the first time to interact with other people […] In other words, if people are not castrated in the symbolic sense, they cannot participate in the social system […] Growth and maturation is a repeated process of loss repeated over and over again. The pain of growing up is the pain of castration, but the difficulty of castration is that it is something that must be forced on you by other people. (p. 173)

A person who has managed to postpone his or her symbolic castration is unable to accept the social constraints imposed on him or her, therefore making him or her incapable of participating in the society, as this participation is always mediated by social roles, which impose restrictions on the subject. The person is caught in a permanent state of adolescence (the subtitle of Saitō’s book is “Adolescence Without End”). By withdrawing from social life the young person is able to free him or herself from social obligations. Yet this freedom comes with the cost of dependency, psychic disturbance and the inability to interact with other people.

According to Saitō, the main culprit here is the education system. As more and more young people enter into higher education, participation in the society, settling on a job and determining one’s place, is postponed further and further. Moreover, the educational system urges students to believe in the illusion that everyone has infinite possibilities and equal chances of success, something that Saitō’s socially withdrawn clients were cursing. There’s a two-fold set of principles operating in schools: on the one hand, there’s a homogenizing principle, which casts all students as equal and subjects them to the same treatment, but, on the other hand, there’s also a heterogenizing principle, which differentiates students according to their grades. So, the educational system places, first, a moratorium on self-determination, and, secondly, imposes on students a set of values, which is incompatible with the realities of the society.

Saitō’s psychoanalytic narrative parallels that of Ehrenberg. In Saitō, as in Ehrenberg, freedom from social constraints becomes a source of psychic repression, resulting in pathological forms of behaviour. From here arises the problem of how to conceptualize freedom without the delusions of individualism but also without relapsing into conservative thinking (“You see, things were better when we respected traditional roles!”). I won’t go into this difficult question as it is out of the scope of this text. But, in the following concluding section, I would like to supplement Saitō’s psychoanalytic analysis with a sociological remark.

VII

What is missing from Saitō’s analysis is the social context of late capitalism. If social withdrawal results from the inability to adapt to social roles, one can also claim that the traditional social roles have become harder or impossible to reach. That is to say, the prospects of finding a well-paying secure job haven’t been so great, especially for working-class young adults, from the 70’s onwards in most Western countries and since the early 90’s in Japan. Late capitalism, with its low-growth economy of unemployment, precarity and extended periods of education, fails to provide a solid economic foundation for traditional life paths (straight from education to a well-paying secure job, marriage and a family of one’s own). Moreover, as women have increasingly entered the labor force and higher education, the traditional nuclear family has lost some of its former weight. The emancipatory dimensions of this should not be underestimated, yet the entry into the labor market coincided with the period of low growth and the restructuring of the labor market.

If we read these developments together with individualism (a cultural trend, which has also penetrated Japan to a certain extent (Suzuki et al. 2010)), one gets the following picture: while young people have been forced to endure precariousness and uncertainty in their working life and paths to adulthood, these are still experienced as matters of individual choice. This is what Furlong and Cartmel (2007) call “the epistemological fallacy of late modernity”. One should note the epistemological character of this fallacy: it’s not that young people can really choose their lives as they wish in a kind of a social vacuum but, nonetheless, it’s what they believe they are doing. Consequently, all possible short-comings can only be experienced as results of one’s own personal failure. If you’re unable to find a good job, if you can’t survive in the competitive academic world or if you can’t endure the stress of a precarious lifestyle, it’s your fault. This is how late capitalism produces its neoliberal subjects: we learn to blame ourselves for the failures of our social system (Silva 2013). Perhaps we could treat social withdrawal as a symptom of this fallacy?

Now that I’ve turned in my bachelor’s thesis I can safely write a full essay on my topic on my blog. This is not going to be a translation of my thesis but rather a reworked text, which summarizes some parts and rethinks some other parts. My topic combined nicely a politically hot topic in Finland – so called marginalized youth – and one of my random interests – the Japanese society. So, the following text (in two parts!) is going to be about the so called hikikomori, or socially withdrawn young people. I am not going to be as pedantic about references and sources as I was in my thesis (obviously!) but I’m going to add them where I think they’re needed.

I

“Hikikomori” (which translates into withdrawal and means both, the withdrawn young people and the phenomenon of withdrawal itself) popped into the public discourse during the 1990’s in Japan. The term denotes a group of young people secluded in their homes for long periods of time without participation in the working life, education or training and without social contacts (apart from family members). For the purposes of this essay, I will follow Victor Wong’s (2009) definition of social withdrawal: a young person can be said to be socially withdrawn when he or she has spent his or her time almost exclusively in his or her home/room, without a formal social status (that is to say, he or she is a NEET – not in employment, education or training) and without face-to-face social contacts apart from his or her family, for the period of at least six months (a common period of time used in psychiatry to separate pathological cases from non-pathological ones). It should be noted that these parameters are not set in stone. They merely present us with a “clinical” or “pure” case of social withdrawal.

A study on the amount of hikikomori-related articles in Japanese newspapers shows that the phenomenon became widely discussed especially at the turn of the century (from 1997 onward) (Furlong 2008). This indicates two things: First, the phenomenon can be said to have become increasingly prevalent since the beginning of the 1990’s. Second, and in contrast to the first point, it can also be claimed that the media discourse merely shed light to this phenomenon, gave it a definition and problematized/pathologized it. The first perspective focuses our attention to the changes that have taken place in the Japanese society since the early 1990’s. The second one instructs us to think critically about the media and think about the ways it does not only report about social problems but also constructs them. Indeed, young people have always been pathologized and demonized in the media and public discourse. The attention given to the “hikikomori-epidemic” can be viewed as a form of moral panic, especially since the media tends to portray these socially withdrawn young people as lazy parasites living off their parents’ or the state’s money or as psychologically disturbed young people inclined to psychosis and explosive aggressive behavior.

In recent years “the hikikomori problem” has been recognized as an international one, affecting not only Japan but also countries of the West (such as European countries) and other ones as well. My interest in the topic was largely triggered by a documentary I saw about socially withdrawn young people – resembling hikikomori – in my own country (Finland). As the phenomenon is not particularly Japanese (or East-Asian), it calls for approaches that do not merely focus on characteristics of the Japanese society (such as the presumably prevalent “Confucian collectivism” of the Japanese people) but deal with the changes that have occured in developed countries globally. All that being said, it is possible, and propable, that the phenomenon is nonetheless more prevalent in Japan than elsewhere, which is why the Japanese society deserves special treatment in analysis.

In the following I am going to try to explain the phenomenon of social withdrawal both in the light of psychiatric research and the changing social context of developed countries in general and Japan in particular. The first perspective draws the attention on mental disorders and the psychological etiology of social withdrawal. This kind of approach – by its very nature – tends to deal with socially withdrawn young people as individual cases and abstracts the phenomenon from its social context. The second perspective tries to link the phenomenon to the changes that have taken place in the society (especially the changing labor-market). Both approaches have their advantages, which I try to bring forth. Before delving deeper into these explanatory models I will take a look at the age, gender and socio-economic background of socially withdrawn youth (shortened to SWY in the following).

II

SWY seem to be mostly in the age category of 15-30. An epidemiological study from Japan found that the average age of people at the start of the withdrawal period was 22,3 years. However, over 40% of respondents reported their age at the beginning of the withdrawal period to be 15-19 years (which seems to be in line with studies from South-Korean and Hong Kong). Moreover, the study found that during the period of 2002-2006 over 30% of people currently experiencing withdrawal were included in the age category of 25-29 (whereas other categories included fewer people). This might be an indication of the persistence of the condition: people start withdrawing in their late teens and the condition persists for years. On the other hand, the study also asked their respondents how long the period of withdrawal was and the result was one year on average (while 16% reported over two years). (Koyama et al. 2010.) What complicates this issue is that for many withdrawn people the period of withdrawal is not a singular continuous period of time: people can go in and out of withdrawal multiple times during their lives (Kaneko 2006).

There seems to be a strong consensus among commentators that SWY tend to be mostly male (with a 70% or more majority). Gender seems to be the strongest common denominator across the whole spectrum of SWY. In fact, Saitō Tamaki (2013), a known psycho-analyst and expert on hikikomori, says that, while SWY tend to become from different classes and have different personal backgrounds, most of them seem to that this in common, that they are male. Yet the evidence is not conclusive. The domestic role placed on women in the Japanese society is likely to hide the phenomenon of female hikikomori (Furlong 2008). Michael Dziesinski (2005), who has studied SWY in a hikikomori rehabilitation facility in Japan, notes that the social withdrawal of girls in their homes often simply goes under the radar of their parents, who might even applaud this kind of behavior to a certain extent. Consequently psychiatric clinics and support groups get flooded by socially withdrawn males, whose parents get alarmed by the behavior of their reclusive sons. Moreover, in the public discourse there exists a highly gendered category of “parasite singles”, which mostly refers to single women still living with their parents. As Dziensinski points out, while many of the female “parasites” belong to the same category of SWY as male hikikomori, the phenomenon gets discursively construed as a male issue.

Evidence of the class composition of SWY is similarly not conclusive. The most common conception is that SWY largely come from upper- or middle-class families (who can also afford to have an idle child in their home). The only two Japanese sources I could find, which deal with the socio-economic background of SWY, are Saitō (2013) and Hattori (2005). Both are psychiatrists who base their views on the patients of their private clinics. It seems to me that samples gathered from private clinics might insert some bias to the results as working-class families might not be able to afford to provide such treatment to their children. Moreover, the working-class is over-represented in the NEET population, which also suggests that the middle-class view is biased. In constrast to this, Wong’s (2009) study of SWY in Hong Kong found that SWY mostly came from poor working-class backgrounds. So much for the claim that hikikomori are just spoiled and lazy kids of rich families!

III

Looking at SWY through a psychiatric lens the phenomenon appears as an issue of mental illness. In fact, this has been the predominant approach of hikikomori research. The basic formula of this type of research is this one: pick out a sample of SWY, diagnose the most prevalent mental disorders associated with the condition and suggest a form of treatment. There’s also some psychological research dealing with the etiology of social withdrawal as well as psycho-analytic approaches. It should be noted beforehand that the psychiatric approach – while it’s perfectly valid on its own terms – tends to pathologize SWY and transform the phenomenon into a simple problem of how to reintegrate these marginal young people to the society through therapeutic interventions. If the social context is not ignored, as it is not in etiological and psychoanalytic research, the roots of the condition are usually located to family dynamics and peer relations.

In many studies it has been found that the most common mental disorders associated with social withdrawal are depression, anxiety and social phobia (see, for example, Koyama et al. 2010). Moreover, the condition has also been associated with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), eating disorders, anthropophobia (fear of people, which manifests itself in fears of other people’s gazes, fears that one’s body is displeasing to others because of appearance, movements, body odor etc.) and internet addiction among other disorders. Some researchers have also noted the prevalence of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) symptoms, such as emotional numbness, insomnia or other somatic symptoms, among SWY, indicating that some SWY might be suffering from traumas left from their experiences in the past (bullying, rejection by parents etc.). (Hattori 2005; Lee et al. 2013.)

A few words should be said here about internet addiction. First, the common image of a contemporary adolescent escaping from the real world into a virtual reality does not really offer any kind of an explanation for social withdrawal. True, many SWY tend to spend a lot of time on their computer (Lee et al. 2013), but there are also many who don’t (in fact, Saitō goes as far as to claim that most SWY don’t even go on the internet [Furlong 2008]). And even if the presence of computers, consoles and phones can make it easier for some young people to withdraw (physically) from social life, one simply cannot draw a direct causal line from computers to hikikomori; it is not because young people become internet addicts that they withdraw (although perhaps an internet addiction can follow from the state of withdrawal?). Moreover, to pathologize the use of the internet is to be blind to how SWY actually use the internet: to communicate with people. Wong & Ying (2006) have found that, although SWY isolate themselves physically from social life, they maintain and form social contacts via phone lines and the internet (who would have guessed?) One can even reverse the typical formula, according to which virtual contacts are a poor artificial replacement for real physical proximity. For many SWY, on the contrary, it is the “real” world, which is artificial and full of people who betray you, whereas “virtual” reality offers a safe channel to form close relationships.

Considering the etiology of social withdrawal, there is an article by Krieg & Dickie (2013), which attempts to construct a psycho-social developmental model of social withdrawal by basing it on the individual’s ambivalent form of attachment. Attachment theory claims that during early childhood the child forms an attachment to his/her surroundings and other people, which survives to his/her later life stages, guiding his/her social behavior and affects. The formation of attachment is dependent largely on the nature of the relationship between a caregiver and his/her child. A healthy form of attachment needs for its development a responsive caregiver, catering to his/her child’s needs. According to Krieg & Dickie, the form of attachment associated with social withdrawal is the ambivalent form. An ambivalently attached child clings to an inconsistent/contradictory caregiver at the expense of exploring his/her surroundings. A socially withdrawn young person can be seen to have formed an ambivalent sort of attachment, making him/her dependent on his/her parents while the world outside the home appears to him/her as an unknown horror.

It is, moreover, claimed by Krieg & Dickie that some particular forms of Japanese parenthood might aggravate the socially withdrawn behavior of their children. First, it is common for Japanese mothers to be overprotective towards their children, safeguarding them from all sorts of negative experiences and micromanaging their behavior. Second, and in contrast with the first, the practice of so called amae is also common. It refers to a disciplinary practice where the parent shows ignorance towards his/her child. At the extreme, parents sometimes lock their children out of their homes. Dysfunctional family patterns are also emphasized strongly by Hattori (2005) but not from the viewpoint of attachment but of psycho-analysis. The hikikomori patients treated by Hattori came from emotionally cold families. Parents showed either ignorance towards their child or the relations of dependency were inverted: the child was forced to cater to the emotional needs of his/her parents and not the other way around. Consequently many of the patients expressed anger towards their parents (more than 40% of his sample even expressed the desire to kill their parents).

Another factor, which might reinforce an unhealthy form of attachment, is dysfunctional peer relationships. SWY are significantly more likely to have experienced bullying at school than their non-withdrawn counterparts (Lee et al. 2013). Moreover, experiences of being bullied are associated with social phobia (which often occurs together with depression and anxiety) (Ranta et al. 2009). If bullying is significantly connected with social withdrawal, Japanese schools seem to be ideal breeding grounds of hikikomori: bullying is common in Japanese schools. Moreover, ijime (bullying) appears to take unique forms in Japan, where it commonly manifests itself as isolating the bullied student. Being isolated is also one of the most feared forms of bullying among Japanese students. In addition to this, the common story of intolerance of difference presents itself here too: expressing some kind of visible differences from the group expose students to the risks of becoming targets of bullying. (Rios-Ellis et al. 2000.)

IV

The psychiatric view runs into obstacles when social withdrawal does not appear to be associated with any kind of mental illness. In fact, in the epidemiological study referred to above (Koyama et al. 2010) it was found that, although people who had experienced social withdrawal at some point in their lives were six times more likely than other respondents to have suffered from mental illness as well (not necessarily during the withdrawal period), about half of the cases of social withdrawal were not accompanied by any mental disorders. In spite of the methodological difficulties of the study it is safe to say that a significant portion of cases of social withdrawal does not represent any kind of psychological distress but is to be explained by other means.

In the light of the obstacles of psychological research it is appropriate to refer to the explanatory schema provided by Saitō (2013). He understands the condition of social withdrawal not as some kind of a static state caused by this or that singular factor, such as depression or social phobia, but as a circular process constantly reproducing itself out of the combination of many factors (he calls these processes “hikikomori systems”). In Saitō’s schema social withdrawal is constantly being produced and reproduced through the dysfunctional relations between three fields, the individual, the family and the society. The process of treatment then is to restore functional communication between all these three fields. That is to say, treatment is not going to work, for example, by the withdrawn child’s family’s attempts to push the kid to work (these kind of pressures tend to have the opposite effect on the withdrawn individual). Moreover, restoring healthy communication between a withdrawn child and his/her parents is not a guarantee of the child’s societal participation.

In contrast to Saitō’s psycho-analytic approach, I’d prefer to emphasize the sociological dimensions of social withdrawal. However, Saitō’s schema of social withdrawal as a process or a vicious circle (as opposed to a static state) can be easily adopted into a sociological approach as well. Moreover, Saitō’s model allows for multiple factors contributing to social withdrawal. Therefore, we do not have to choose whether we’re going to explain the phenomenon in psychiatric terms, in the language of mental illness, or in social terms, in the language of diminished employment opportunities etc. All of these factors come into play in a comprehensive analysis. In addition to this, thinking social withdrawal as a process opens up certain possibilies that are closed if we were to constain ourselves to understanding social withdrawal as a static state. The latter schema privileges simplistic causal explanations (certain factors found in the past, such as experiences of bullying, result in the present state of social withdrawal) whereas the former allows us to think also about conditions, which do not directly result in social withdrawal but might prevent the individual from getting out of the vicious circle.

In the following part 2 I’ll try to offer some sociological explanations for social withdrawal. Perhaps the key problems are not to be found in the pathological psyches of withdrawn individuals but in a social system, which prevents a growing number of young people from participating in it or, more radically, even produces this kind of a surplus population as a matter of its own inner necessity?

Kaneko, Sachiko 2006: Japan’s ‘socially withdrawn youths’ and time constraints in Japanese society: management and conceptualization of time in a support group for ‘hikikomori’. Time & Society 2–3/15, 233–249.

I am late. Very, very late. This series already ended with ridiculously positive response from the audience and its critics already last year, after 5 seasons worth of psychological torment and ethical challenges. After having avoided the show for a long time due to its rather non-interesting setup, I finally decided to watch it. And, as usual with critically acclaimed series, it sank in. So, I’ll take an unusual path and write some thoughts on a non-anime series (applying theory to not so a substandard production for a change!)

SPOILERS AHEAD

I

Here’s a short recap of the show for those who, for some reason, have no clue what it’s about:

Walter White is quite the average American citizen. He’s a chemistry teacher in high school, married to a woman named Skyler, he has a 15-year-old son (who suffers from cerebral palsy) and a daughter on the way and – best of all – he lives in a typical American suburb in New Mexico, sealing the stereotypical American Beauty type of a picture of the banal everyday life of the American white middle-class. Yet life doesn’t go to smoothly for Walt. Due to his small salary he needs to work two jobs, helping out at a car wash to make some extra cash. Yet this is not the biggest of his worries: in the beginning of the series he is diagnosed with lung cancer.

Knowing what the health policy in the United States is like, it is no surprise that Walt runs into quite big money problems after his diagnosis. So, he decides to earn some extra dollars in a business that promises high returns quick and easy – manufacturing and dealing methamphetamine. A series of events leads him to partner with Jesse Pinkman, a former student of his who is very much in the meth business (the trademark of Jesse’s cooking is a touch of chili, apparently). After a rough start their business starts to grow and their product gains fame due to its extraordinary purity (Walt is a chemist, after all). Walt and Jesse get ever deeper in the drug circles until they’re finally hired to cook meth for a drug lord who is running the biggest drug empire in South America.

The series grows progressively darker as Walt goes through his character development from a scared and cautious suburban father into a bold, cynical and heartless criminal mastermind. If, in the first season, Walt ponders days and days whether he is able to kill a man locked up in the basement to save his ass, in the final season he is able to order the killing of a series of characters without a second thought. As for Jesse, his development is more ambiguous as he struggles to break free from the drug business while being simultaneously drawn – and forced – back to it. Yet, in spite of a couple killings by his hand, he does not go through the same journey towards nihilism as Walt does.

As for Walt’s family, for a long period of time Walt managed to keep his meth business a secret from them. However, after a series of exposed lies and unbelievable (in the literal sense of the term) explanations for his behavior, his wife Skyler finally finds out something is wrong and learns the truth – at least a part of it, since she likes to retain her ignorant bliss about all of Walt’s wrongdoings. Experiencing some conflict whether she should expose her meth cooking husband, she finally decides to help him launder all the money he is making. As for the kids, Walt Jr., the teen-aged son, only finds out in the final season, as do Walt’s brother-in-law Hank (who works for the DEA) and Skyler’s sister/Hank’s wife Marie.

Aaron Paul’s depictions of emotional breakdown make an essential part of Jesse Pinkman’s character.

II

Walt’s dark character development is sustained, at least on the surface, by his devotion to his family. In the story he tells himself and others, he is able to go to such great lengths to compromise his humanity because he is doing it for the best of his family. Indeed, he is so eager to protect his family that he is willing to risk their lives for it. What we get here is his patriarchal fantasy of fulfilling the role of the bread winning father, a rather private project as it turns out his actions are only supported by himself.

This fantasy of adopting the role of the authoritative and powerful father should be read together with his powerlessness depicted in the beginning of the show. Not only is Walt portrayed as a quiet and privately repressed character, his life seems to be dictated by all sorts of external events; his dire economic situation, his son’s needs and his wife’s surveillance, and, foremost, his cancer diagnosis all render him powerless. Turning to drug dealing enables him finally to take control over his own life and turn around the family dynamics – he is no longer going to be afraid and take his wife’s nagging, he is the one providing for and protecting the family, and he deserves respect.

All this is turned on its head during the second half of the show. Skyler is unable to turn his husband in and helps him launder his money while keeping everything secret from her son. As things progress she spirals deeper into emotional despair. She can’t go to the police, she’s afraid for her family and hates her husband. She has effectively become her emotionally abusive husband’s hostage. But here’s the catch: is this not the flip side of Walt’s private fantasy? He got what he wanted – his wife is subordinated to him – yet their family life has turned into a nightmare.

It is also quite interesting to read this series in the light of the concept of a subject-supposed-not-to-know (yes, I can’t write anything without referring to Žižek’s terminology somewhere!) It is possible to read Walt’s twisted character development in the light of the fact that he is able to outsource his humanity onto his family, especially his son. He can go on doing bad things, as long as they don’t know, as long as Walter Jr. doesn’t know. Indeed, the final breakdown of the family happens precisely at the moment Walter Jr. learns the truth about his father, after which Walt decides to disappear with his new identity.

When Skyler is sad, Skyler smokes.

III

These dynamics are interwoven with the thematic of pride. This is already clear in the first episodes. Walt is being offered baits to exit from the drug business, yet he refuses due to his pride. Perhaps the most crucial of these baits was the offer made by Walt’s friends and former colleagues Elliott and Gretchen Schwartz to pay for his cancer treatment (and consequently he wouldn’t need the drug money). Elliott and Gretchen are running a successful company called Grey Matter, a company that Walter helped to found. Due to his resentment and frustration for leaving the company early on, Walt refuses the money Elliott and Gretchen are offering. He is not going to succumb to charity.

In fact, Walt is too proud to do a lot of things in the show. For instance, he gets angry at people who are trying to replicate his product or work in Heisenberg’s (his street name, so to speak) name. Also, in a childish spurt, he shoots his former business associate after being accused of screwing up things and told that he should have known his place in the food chain. He keeps piling up money, a lot more than he or even his children could ever use, and holds on to it for the piles of dollar bills are nothing less than a physical manifestation of the value of his work. His pride is ultimately dependent on others’ recognition, yet he can’t get it from his family so he has to build his fame in the drug world.

Demanding recognition.

The value of pride and meritocratic individual achievement, relying only on oneself and not accepting dependency on others, is deeply ingrained in the American culture, at least if we believe Jennifer Silva who interviewed 100 working-class young adults and wrote a book about her findings called Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. In her text, Silva finds that many young working-class people harbor almost pathological distrust towards other people and public institutions. This distrust could be dismissed as delusional if it wasn’t based on actual experiences of abuse and betrayal. The flip side of this distrust is the ideal of self-sufficiency: if others can’t be trusted, the only thing I can count on is myself and, consequently, the responsibility of my successes and failures in life is mine only.

The field, which offered the seemingly neutral place to put one’s individual action at work, was the market; an individual can prove himself by earning money from his labor. The labor market as a field of equal exchange is an illusion already exposed by Marx who showed that in the exchange of labor-power for money the worker always produces more value than he gets in return as a wage. The labor market, although seemingly a field of free contracts and equal exchange, is a fundamentally unequal institution. Yet this is not how the working-class young people in Silva’s sample saw it. For them, any shortcomings were necessarily the cause of one not trying hard enough, even in the cases of obvious racial discrimination. This is how the neoliberal subject comes into being: we learn to blame ourselves for the structural inequalities and exclusive mechanisms of the society.

It is in this context where one should locate Walt’s sense of pride and obsession with his money. Up to the very last episode he treats his millions as a manifestation of HIS efforts. He earned them by his own hard work, not by some external circumstances, charity or pure luck. In the final episode where he forces Elliott and Gretchen to launder his money and give it to his son on his 18th birthday, he explicitly stresses that all possible expenses should be taken from the stash of money left by him, for he is only going to pay his son with what HE has earned and he refuses the idea that Elliott and Gretchen should pay with their money. Granted, the market Walt earned his money from is not exactly the legally legitimate one, yet the logic of engaging in seemingly neutral market transactions as a way to prove one’s worth is deeply held by Walt.

A fair exchange?

IV

And now, finally, the ending. A lot of people seem to have liked it, yet it is not without its critics. And I tend to side with the latter. For a short recap:

After having disappeared and changed his identity, Walt returns to New Mexico on his 52nd birthday, two years since his first meth dealings. What he has in mind is first, to leave the millions he still has left to Elliott and Gretchen so they can leave it to his son later on, and second, to take revenge on a gang of neo-nazis who stole the rest of his money and killed his brother-in-law. The first goes as described above and the latter is also a success. The gang members all wind up dead, including Lydia, Walt’s former business associate now dealing with the gang. In the process Walt also manages to rescue Jesse who has been held captive by the neo-nazis. As for closures in the family drama, Walt briefly visits Skyler in her new home, finally admitting that he did everything only for his own sake while protecting his family was just an attempt to rationalize it. He also gives her map coordinates, which will lead to the place where Hank is buried and which Skyler could trade with her prosecutor. In the very final shot Walt is lying on the ground, dying from a gunshot wound, while the camera moves slowly upwards. It is clear that Walt has achieved a sense of inner peace.

The reason I’m siding with the critics of the finale is that, as they say, it all seems to go too smoothly for Walt, for he gets absolutely everything he wanted. As Emily Nussbaum writes in the New Yorker:

[I]t was troubling, and yes, disappointing, if only because the story ended by confirming Walt’s most grandiose notions: that he is, in fact, all-powerful, the smartest guy in the room, the one who knocks. Anyone other than Walt becomes a mere reflection of this journey to redemption […] It’s not that Walt needed to suffer, necessarily, for the show’s finale to be challenging, or original, or meaningful: but Walt succeeded with so little true friction—maintaining his legend, reconciling with family, avenging Hank, freeing Jesse, all genuine evil off-loaded onto other, badder bad guys—that it felt quite unlike the destabilizing series that I’d been watching for years.

It is slightly off-putting to see Walt, who has caused so much devastation to those around him, die so happy and managing to bring closure to his life, tying up loose ends, just to way he wanted to. What kind of a strange universe is this one, where karma doesn’t punish those who do wicked actions? I’m even tempted to interpret his broken family ties as a secret aspect of the patriarchal fantasy: does the role of the providing but distant father have to be negative? Is it not also a conformist fantasy where one is able to fulfill his role as a financial provider, the fatherly breadwinner, while retaining complete independence? Is the lack of emotional ties not the secret condition of possibility for playing this role?

Yet it would be a mistake to focus on Walt’s personal redemption. In fact, it is obscene no matter what happened, whether he suffered or not. The failure of the finale consisted, at least in my view, in its explicit focus on Walt. That is understandable because the show is very much about Walt and his personal development. But the flip side of this is that everything then becomes, as Nussbaum puts it, “a mere reflection of this journey to redemption”. Except, and this Nussbaum doesn’t say, it also works also if you replace redemption with personal tragedy. In fact, the latter may have been even more obscene: the victims of Walt’s actions would then become characters in a great narcissistic play of sublime self-blame.

If you don’t believe me, watch Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing. It follows the right wing “gangsters” (as they are called) responsible for the anti-communist purge of Indonesia in 1965-1966 40 years after the killings. Oppenheimer and his crew allow the gangsters to capture their memoirs on film, staging the actual killings and arranging all sorts of imaginary scenes, which are supposed to symbolize their actions and frames of mind. The most shocking part of the movie, if you don’t count all the horrible acts of killing, is that the gangsters seem, for the most part, to harbor no guilt for their actions. On the contrary, if anything, they’re proud of taking part in the slaughter of over 500,000 people. There is no karma here: Anwar Congo, the “star” of the documentary who personally killed over 1,000 people, and his gang enjoy their privileges as a part of the ruling class and keep running their corrupted business.

In the end of the documentary Anwar, as an exception to the rule, starts feeling regret for his actions. During one of the staged scenes depicting his killings, he is playing a victim in front of the camera and starts tearing up, saying that he is feeling what his victims felt (Oppenheimer is quick to comment on the obscenity of this). Later on, we see him on a rooftop where many of his killings took place and he keeps gagging as the memories of the killings are coming back to him. There’s something poetic in this (your actions will haunt you forever) but it is obscene as well: one can easily imagine how Anwar might play this in his head, where it all probably adds up to make a majestic dostoyevskyan moral drama – which is all about him.

The proper way to have ended Breaking Bad, at least in my mind, would have been to shift the focus from Walt to Jesse, who still had some humanity left in him, to let him escape from captivity and progress from there (To which direction, I don’t know. Perhaps to Brock, the kid he felt responsible for?). As for Walt’s family, it would have been great to have a deeper glimpse of the everyday life of Skyler and her kids, and to see how Walter Jr. was affected by everything. And what about Walt himself? How about we let him freeze to death in his cabin, all alone and powerless? Because, you know, fuck Walter White and whatever he might be feeling.

In the introduction to The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek invites the reader to think the absurd: to apply Hegelian dialectical analysis to sexual practices. What makes this exercise ridiculous is not directly its sexual content but the “short circuit” between two levels, which usually don’t appear in the same text: high philosophical theory and low mundane life. I’ve been doing something quite similar in this blog, namely applying theoretical concepts to low-brow entertainment. The following text is loyal to this approach and extends my theoretical engagement with anime.

I

Žižek also remarks somewhere that the ideological currents of today’s society are best exemplified in Hollywood movies and, most of all, in cartoons (I only need to point to his commentary on Kung-fu Panda). Couldn’t this also be the case with anime? In a previous post, I have already discussed the meritocratic ideology or, if you will, the work ethic frequently played out in anime. There I attempted to point out some oppressive dimensions of the meritocratic ideology of hard work. To put it more specifically: capitalism cannot keep the promises it makes due to its structurally unequal nature and, therefore, the demands made on the working subject become unbearable for him or her. In this post I will return to these topics but with a slightly different conceptual approach.

As the second season recently ended, it is only appropriate to make my case with the sports anime Kuroko no Basuke (engl. Kuroko’s Basketball). The synopsis of the show follows the trails of other sports anime. Borrowing from Wikipedia:

The basketball team of Teikō Middle School rose to distinction by demolishing all competition. The regulars of the team became known as the “Generation of Miracles”. After graduating from middle school, these five stars went to different high schools with top basketball teams. However, a fact few know is that there was another player in the “Generation of Miracles”: a phantom sixth man. This mysterious player is now a freshman at Seirin High, a new school with a powerful, if little-known, team. Now, Kuroko Tetsuya, the sixth member of the “Generation of Miracles”, and Kagami Taiga, a naturally talented player who spent most of middle school in the US, are aiming to bring Seirin to the top of Japan, taking on Kuroko’s former teammates one by one.

If you know anything about anime in general and sports anime in particular, you’ll immediately get the gist. This is a show about ambitious goals, hard work and the emotional turbulence involved in the process. We get to follow Seirin High School’s basketball team as they go through hard training, extremely intense matches and personal emotional conflicts with former friends and enemies. The underlying theme of the show is, of course, the very spirit of meritocracy: with hard work, self-discipline and determination, you’ll be able to overcome all obstacles. This is played out in various ways as our team faces opponents, who are almost impossible to beat, and even some lost battles (namely the match against Kuroko’s former team-mate, Aomine).

The show also plays with the theme of rivalry (it’s a sports anime, afterall). How is it possible to maintain friendly relations with your toughest rivals? This doesn’t only hold between Kuroko and his former team-mates, the generation of miracles, but also between Kagami and his good friend from his childhood who, like Kagami, also returned back from the US to Japan and plays in an another team. As interesting as this topic of rivalry versus friendship is, I’m going to put it aside for now and focus on the antinomies of the show’s work ethic.

II

What kind of an affective economy does the meritocratic ideology (defined here as the idea of success depending on the individual effort put into it – “hard work pays off”) rely on? On the first sight the work ethic seems to operate by the logic of desire: the desired object is the thing, which you aim for and which is supposed to bring you satisfaction once you’ve achieved it by your own efforts. In the case of Kuroko no Basuke, the object of desire could be said to be winning a tournament. This is what our protagonists work so hard for, beating everyone else in the game and taking the first place.

However, this is not the whole story. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, makes a distinction between desire and drive. Both forms of attachment are attachments to an object but the forms of these attachments differ. For Lacan, the object of desire overlaps with its loss and only emerges as lost. That is to say, if I understand it correctly, the desired for object only exists as a counterpart of your desire. That is why the desire of our protagonists is never going to be fully satisfied: there will always be other tournaments, other opponents, other challenges. The object of desire is a fleeting object, something which escapes our grasp once we think we have reached it.

Drive, on the other hand, operates by a different logic of affective engagement. Whereas desire finds its momentary satisfaction in reaching its goal, the lost object of desire, drive find its satisfaction in this loss itself. Drive is the compulsion to repeat failed attempts to reach one’s goal. In this sense it is a countermovement to desire. As Žižek explains:

[A] drive does not bring satisfaction because its object is a stand-in for the Thing, but because a drive, as it were, turns failure into triumph – in it, the very failure to reach its goal, the repetition of this failure, the endless circulation around the object, generates a satisfaction of its own. As Lacan put it, the true aim of a drive is not to reach its goal, but to circulate endlessly around it. (The Parallax View, p. 63-64)

In the match that concludes season 2, between Seirin High School and Yōsen High School, there is a wonderful short dialogue between Kiyoshi, Kuroko’s team-mate, and Murasakibara, Kuroko’s former team-mate and one of the generation of miracles. In the first half of the match Murasakibara’s team appears to be overpowering Kiyoshi’s with their strong defense. In spite of this Seirin’s morale is high. Annoyed with the no-giving-up spirit of Kiyoshi, Murasakibara snaps at him:

Murasakibara: “You never learn. I just don’t understand why people work so hard when they can’t win.”
Kiyoshi: “Whether or not I can win doesn’t matter. Working towards a goal is just so much fun, I can’t help myself.”

These two lines follow different logics, the first one that of desire and the second one that of drive. Murasakibara can’t understand why would someone not be discouraged by failure to reach one’s goal. This is common sense. What good comes from endlessly failing to achieve anything, failing to fulfill one’s desire? Kiyoshi, on the other hand, finds satisfaction in working towards a goal, which is to say, in endless circulation around it. Whether the goal will be reached or not is not the main point for Kiyoshi. What he wants is to repeat the game over and over again regardless of failure or, what would be more appropriate for drive, to reenact failure over and over again.

So what if we conceptualized the work ethic as drive instead of desire? What if there is a movement in the process of working your way towards a goal from the desire to reach it to the drive to endlessly repeat the failure to reach it? In Kuroko no Basuke this is played out whenever our protagonists get fired up as a consequence of defeat. Some examples: After the first match with Aomine’s team Kagami is forced to face his weakness, but only to be motivated by it afterwards. Kuroko goes through something similar in the second match with Aomine as he is able to block all the polished techniques Kuroko worked so hard for. The pinnacle of this logic of defeat-as-triumph is, of course, Kiyoshi “the Iron Heart” who never gives up even after repeated failure.

III

Apparently the Japanese get kicks out of failure in real life as well. In cross-cultural comparisons of motivational patterns of Japanese and American people, studies have found that whereas Americans typically work harder in response to their own successes relative to their failures, the Japanese work harder in response to failures relative to their successes. This difference is attributed to different cultural logics of Japan and the United States. Whereas the American society values independency and the excellence of individual achievement, the Japanese society is guided by more conformistic values. Placing emphasis on one’s shortcomings allows the Japanese to improve themselves in order to meet conformistic expectations. (see Toivonen et al. 2011: “Unable to conform, unwilling to rebel? Youth, culture and motivation in globalizing Japan”)

In my previous post on the antinomies of the work ethic I made a claim that repeated failures to reach one’s goal wears out the working subject. Not only are you expected to reach impossible goals, you’re not even allowed to give up in response to the repeated failures to reach them. Perhaps I should have added an exception: the kind of work ethic described here is bound to wear out the working subject, unless he or she is Japanese!

But it’s not that simple either. The article mentioned above attempts to explain the so called hikikomori phenomenon. The term refers to a group of teens and young adults withdrawing themselves not only from employment, education and training but also from face-to-face social contacts. The authors put this phenomenon in the context of labor market restructuring that has been taking place in Japan for the past few decades. As a consequence of globalization, unemployment has soared (especially for young people) and jobs have become increasingly “casual” (part-time, fixed term, variable hours, etc.). Due to these structural changes more and more young people are thrown to the labor market to compete for diminishing secure jobs, and less and less young people have access to a decent and secure income, occupational training, full social security benefits and a legitimate social status. (for an excellent account of similar changes that have taken place in Western economies, see Boltanski & Chiapello 2005: “The New Spirit of Capitalism”, especially chapter 4: “Dismantling the World of Work”)

The word often used to describe the current “new normal” of insecurity is precarity. A precarious situation is marked by an insecure work status, un- or underemployment, low income and weakened social benefits and poor psychological welfare (for a text on the psychological consequences of the new spirit of capitalism, see “Spent? Capitalism’s growing problem with anxiety” by JD Taylor). Social withdrawal can be explained as a disillusioned reaction to the current labor market, which has nothing to offer for young people. They are less and less able to conform to the norms of finding a secure job and gaining the expected social status by traditional means. There’s nothing to be learned from failure. In this context the traditional work ethic, the ideology of everything-is-possible-with-hard-work, is cruel.

So, perhaps the term which captures best the affective economy of the work ethic is cruel optimism? I’m borrowing this term from Lauren Berlant, who wrote a book with the same title. She describes cruel optimism as a relation to an object, which you desire but which is actually an obstacle to your flourishing:

“[C]ruel optimism” [is] a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. What’s cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their wellbeing, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. (Cruel Optimism, p. 24)

In the context of the work ethic, we might find cruel optimism in the betrayed promise of rewards for your hard work. No matter how hard you try, you might never be rewarded for it, yet you remain attached to your repeated attempts to reach your goals, finding one insecure job after another in the hope that one day you’ll find the right one, with an actual possibility of security and upward mobility. Cruel optimism could be described as a kind of a bittersweet drive to reenact the scene of betrayed optimism.

IV

I am siding with Murasakibara. When it appears that Seirin High School’s basketball team is able to break Yōsen’s strong defense, Murasakibara goes on full offense with a point to prove: he wants to show that hard work won’t pay off because the game of basketball favors tall players. As a two meters tall giant, he completely overpowers his opponents and scores with ease due to his height. For Murasakibara, who is disillusioned with basketball, the game is not fair: hard work is being undermined by systemic constraints of the game itself, which favor some at the expense of others. Unfortunately, but predictably, the show won’t allow proof for Murasakibara’s claims. In the end Kuroko and his team-mates outsmart him and his team, therefore proving again that everything is possible if you just work your way through it.

In her analysis of Rosetta and La Promesse, Belgian movies about precarious workers, Berlant remarks how both of these films end in an optimistic scene, once more soliciting the audience a hope that perhaps, in spite of the poor conditions of the protagonists in these movies, everything might turn out to be OK for them in the end. In this way, as Berlant says, “[t]o be made to desire a normativity hangover trains the audience in cruel optimism” (p. 178). Perhaps Kuroko no Basuke should be treated in the same way? Is it not simply just another anime to the extensive list of shows training the audience in the (cruel) optimism embedded in the traditional work ethic?

Out of all the field of philosophy I’ve been investing a huge part of my time in reading philosophy of mind; the mind/body relation has been interesting for me since forever. So now that I’m minoring in philosophy in university I could finally put all of that into use in my seminar paper, which officially concluded my philosophy studies. That sounds a lot more epic than it was in reality because the paper turned out to be a complete mess. But, nonetheless, I wanted to write about the topic in this blog as well so here are some of the topics that have caught my attention lately.

I

The mind/body dilemma is an ancient one but the modern conception of it runs something like this: How is it possible that there is an ontological relation between the mind (that is to say: subjectivity, perception, thought, mental content, etc.) and the body (objectivity, physical entities, the “outer” world as opposed to the “inner” world the subject)? These two realms appear to be impossible to reconcile; the subjective world of perception, feeling and thought and the objective world physical entities and forces seem incommensurable.

The modern conception of the dilemma can be traced back to Descartes who separated the mind from the body with his epistemological method. The question for Descartes is the following: “Is there something whose existence I can’t doubt?” The answer, of course, is the existence of the “I”, cogito, the pure thinking subject. Everything that is outside of my own pure subjectivity I can doubt, such as the existence of my laptop, this blog or even my physical body, but I can’t doubt the fact that I think, which proves my own existence to me. Thinking is being.

From this Descartes deducts his dualistic metaphysics. The world, according to Descartes, is composed of two substances. The first substance is the substance of the mind, the substance of pure thought. The second one is the substance of matter, the substance of extensionality. The human being is a combination of the two substances: on the one hand human beings possess thinking minds, one the other hand they also have material bodies. But now Descartes runs into a problem. How is it possible for the two substances to be in a causal relationship with each other? If the two substances really are qualitatively separate, therefore incommensurable, how is it possible for the mind to affect physical reality and vice versa?

Descartes didn’t have an answer for this and the problem has remained ever since. The problems of “Cartesianism” (the name of this doctrine draws from Descartes’s name) have caused modern philosophers to distanciate themselves from Cartesian thought. Contemporary philosophers usually possess an explicitly anti-Cartesian stance, of which there are many varieties. One could, for example, deny the existence of the soul that is separate from the body. That is to say, there is really only one substance, matter. The sort of anti-Cartesianism that I’m the most familiar with takes issue with Descartes’s dualistic approach. According to this view Descartes’s error lies in his strict separation of the inner subjective realm of thought and the outer objective realm of physical objects. One could say that the mind is always already “embodied”, that lower-level bodily sensations affect reasoning, etc. One could also claim that there is really no separation between the “inner” and the “outer”, etc.

The separation of the mind from the body appears to anti-Cartesian thought as a dualistic contradiction that somehow needs to be reconciled. Otherwise we’re going to run into problems such as the problem of causality. As a rule the modes of reconciliation turn to monism in one way or another: one can either eliminate the existence of one substance and affirm the existence of the other (eliminative materialism or subjective idealism) or one can try to break the dualistic formula by attempting to merge the opposing realms together in a non-contradictory sense. I’ll take an example of the latter in the following.

II

One very intriguing anti-Cartesian approach is the one taken by Bennett & Hacker in their work Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003). Positioning themselves not only as opposed to dualistic views of the mind but also to simplistic eliminativist-reductionist formulas (professed by brain scientists and philosophers alike), their criticism of Cartesianism is not only aimed at traditional dualists but also at contemporary neuroscience-driven theories. According to Bennett & Hacker contemporary theories are guilty of what they call “brain-body-dualism”, the tendency to ascribe to the brain similar functions Descartes ascribed to the thinking mind (or mental substance).

Whereas for Descartes consciousness, perception, thinking and so on were attributes of the mind, for contemporary neuroscientists and similarly oriented philosophers it is the brain, which thinks, perceives and is conscious. But, Bennett & Hacker add, it is not the brain, which thinks or perceives, but the human being whose brain it is; it is necessary for a human being to possess a functioning brain in order to think and perceive but it is not the brain, which does the thinking and perceiving nor are perceptions and thoughts located in the brain. (In a similar way it is essential to have a steering wheel in your car while you drive but the driving is not in the steering wheel.)

Furthermore, according to Bennett & Hacker, behind the brain-body-dualism lies a faulty conception of the nature of subjective experience. According to this flawed view, subjective experience is treated as an entirely private phenomenon only accessible to the subject experiencing it. Other people only have indirect access to the private experiences of the subject by observing his or her behaviour. The idea is that whereas I have direct access to my own feelings, such as the sensation of pain, others can only observe my behaviour, for instance acting like I’m in pain, and infer what I might be feeling. But this doesn’t hold because:

[T]he primary warrant for the ascription of psychological predicates to another person or to an animal is conceptually bound up with the meaning of the relevant predicate. Pain-behaviour is a criterion – that is, logically good evidence for being in pain – and perceptual behaviour […] is a criterion for the animal’s perceiving. That such-and-such kinds of behavior are criteria for the ascription of such-and-such a psychological predicate is partly constitutive of the meaning of the predicate in question. (p. 82)

That is to say, in order for me to use the concept “pain” and ascribe it to myself or other people, I must know what this concept means. And the meaning of the concept partly consists of the relevant behaviour, for instance screaming in pain or physically avoiding the source of the pain. Because observable behaviour in this way partly constitutes the meaning of the psychological concepts we use it is not palpable to treat subjective experiences as entirely private phenomena. Thus, the dualistic distinction between my “inner” subjective mental states and my “outer” behaviour that is observable by others is a false one.

I think Bennett & Hacker fail both in and for themselves, that is, they fail to understand the inaccessibility of our mental states and they also fail in terms of their own logic. Taking the latter first: Bennett & Hacker admit that sometimes it happens that a person could be faking or acting out an emotion that he or she is not experiencing. One could also hide what he or she is feeling so that we can’t observe it by his or her behaviour. Therefore we don’t observe other people’s mental states directly but “as directly as possible” (B&H actually say something like this). However, if observable behaviour is “logically good evidence” to ascribe a psychological predicate to a human being we’re observing, where does this possibility of error come from? “From induction!” say Bennett & Hacker, “of course, behaviour is not a guarantee of the presence of the mental state it seems to refer to since we can always be mistaken and led astray by surface appearances!” (OK, they don’t say precisely this but that’s what their argument seems to come down to.) For Bennett & Hacker the connection between behaviour and the mental state expressed by it is both logical and non-logical (inductive): on the one hand behaviour is supposed to be constitutive of the meaning of the psychological predicates we use, but on the other hand we can only establish this connection by inductive inference (thereby admitting the possibility of error, which means there’s always going to be a gap between behaviour and the mental state expressed by it).

Bennett & Hacker are also too eager simply to fuse together my private access to my feelings and the feelings themselves (“I do not have access to pain, I feel pain”). As Zizek remarks somewhere in The Parallax View (2006), when dualists say that other people do not have direct access to my subjective mental states they forget to add that the same applies to myself also. It is characteristic of human beings that their own subjective feelings remain inaccessible to them as subconscious desires, motivations etc. Furthermore, the fact that my own mental states are inaccessible to myself gives rise to specifically human emotions, for instance the conflicting emotions that arise in me when I deny or suppress my own subconscious desires.

I would also add that, in order for us to experience the other as a subject, as an intentional agent with his own thoughts, intentions, desires and so on, he or she precisely must remain behind the veil of appearance. If we could directly observe the intentions, wants and emotions of others in their behaviour they would cease to be subjective agents and turned into robots, i.e. objective mechanical processes. There has to remain an impenetrable dimension of subjectivity in others in order for us to experience them as subjects. Intersubjectivity arises not out of a harmonious process or recognition between two participants but out of an ontological scandal of two solipsisms.

III

So, perhaps the correct path would not be to somehow close the gap between subjectivity and objectivity, or between consciousness and the material realm of physical objects and processes. Perhaps the Cartesian contradiction is not to be solved but to be treated as an ontological constituent of consciousness? Perhaps the contradiction arising from the problem of how consciousness could emerge from biological processes is not due to our limited cognitive capacities or conceptual confusion but is simply an ontological fact? Perhaps the world appears contradictory to us because it really is contradictory?

This seems to be the stance taken by the Hegelian philosopher Catherine Malabou. Here’s a quote from her text on brain plasticity and the dilemma of consciousness, What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2008, orig. 2004):

The transition from the neuronal to the mental supposes negation and resistance. There is no simple and limpid continuity from the one to the other, but rather transformation of the one into the other out of their mutual conflict. We must suppose that mental formation draws its being or identity from the disappearance of the neuronal, born of a sort of blank space that is the highly contradictory meeting point of nature and history. Only an ontological explosion could permit the transition from one order to another, from one organization to another, from one given to another. The neuronal and the mental resist each other and themselves, and it is because of this that they can be linked to one another, precisely because […] they do not speak the same language. (p. 72)

For Malabou the “neuronal” (could as well be taken as the totality of the material/biological basis of consciousness, although Malabou privileges the brain) and the “mental” (subjective consciousness, experience, thought, mental states etc.) are contradictory realms. They are incommensurable, they “resist each other”, and this mutual negation of the other is precisely what links them together. Unlike for Bennett & Hacker, for Malabou, the “transition” from biology to consciousness can only take place as a result or as a form of an “ontological explosion”.

Have we escaped the problems of Cartesianism now? It seems that we’re back to square one: the physical and the mental are incommensurable, contradictory, so there’s no way to explain the causal connection between the two. However, for Malabou, as a Hegelian, there’s only one substance, the substance of materiality, the substance of nature. The subject does not form its own mental substance (as for Descartes) but only arises as a negation of its own material substance. The ontology of the subject is, at its core, negativity. Moreover, the split between consciousness and its biological basis overlaps with the self-contradiction of nature itself:

If there can be transition from nature to thought, this is because the nature of thought contradicts itself. Thus the transition from a purely biological entity to a mental entity takes place in the struggle of the one against the other, producing the truth of their relation. Thought is therefore nothing but nature, but negated nature, marked by its own difference from itself. (p. 81)

Malabou is not trying to play the anti-reductionist game of dualists. She repeatedly makes it clear that she has nothing against reducing consciousness, the self, mental states etc., to physical processes taking place in the brain. However, for Malabou this process is still contradictory and characterized by metaphysical incommensurability between the two since they’re only connected through the negation of each other. As Zizek notes, for Malabou, the statement “the mental is the neuronal” does not mean that mental contents are traceable to physical processes in the brain but that the mental arises out of a neuronal deadlock, i.e. the mental overlaps with the contradiction taking place in the neuronal processes themselves.

From this one could perhaps move on to the biological evolution of consciousness (a topic which I sadly can’t tell much about). If Malabou is correct in insisting that consciousness emerges from a contradiction taking place at the level of the biological, it would have to be shown how an organism, in its natural biological development in its environment, runs into a deadlock that it cannot solve without the powers of reflection provided by consciousness. I’m not yet entirely satisfied with an explanation like this since there’s still a problem with how such powers of reflection are suddenly granted to the purely biological organism.

IV

Before on moving on with Malabou, I’ll have to take a detour through Hegel since Malabou’s theory is a deeply Hegelian conceptualization. I do not want to embarrass myself here and pretend that I understand Hegel but I have read his Phenomenology of Spirit (1977, orig. 1807) quite recently. The book is obnoxiously difficult and remains impenetrable to me in its details but I could still spot the the same substance/subject relation, borrowed by Malabou, in Hegel’s preface to his book:

[T]he living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis. Only this self-restoring sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself – not an original or immediate unity as such – is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. (p. 10)

And further:

The disparity which exists in consciousness between the ‘I’ and the substance which is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in general. This can be regarded as the defect of both, though it is their soul, or that which moves them […] Now, although this negative appears at first as a disparity between the ‘I’ and its object, it is just as much the disparity of the substance with itself. Thus what seems to happen outside of it, to be an activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and Substance shows itself to be essentially Subject. (p. 21)

I could be totally far off with my interpretation (assisted greatly by Malabou and Zizek) but here goes nothing: for Hegel what appears to us as an outer world inhabited by physical objects is already “mediated” or “posited” by consciousness. That does not mean that without consciousness physical objects would somehow cease to exist but merely that the object-form, “thinghood” as Hegel puts it somewhere, does not exist as such but only in relation to the subject/consciousness. Of course, my laptop would not cease to exist if I wasn’t thinking about it or perceiving it, but it’s only an “object”, a concrete positive entity, in relation to my conscious reflection. My laptop’s “thinghood” is a result of it being mediated by my consciousness.

At the same time the disparity between the “I”, the subject/consciousness, and the object confronted by it is the same as the disparity of the substance with itself. This is relatively easy to understand if you just take into account that, as a subjective consciousness, you nonetheless exist in the same metaphysical reality as the objects you confront. Your conscious reflection of objects is, at the same time, reality reflecting on itself (because your consciousness is a part of reality). The subject-object relation is merely the form in which substance “repels” itself from itself and appears to itself as an object separate from it.

Through this process of self-negation/mediation, where the substance repels itself from itself, it is constituted as a subject and gains access to its own positive content (i.e. it receives an objective form with all sorts of concrete attributes). Jumping back to the topic of the biological evolution of consciousness: perhaps the disparity that exists between consciousness, perception, thought, mental states etc., and biological/neuronal entities is merely the result of the self-mediation of nature itself whereby the physical body can’t help but appear to conscious reflection as a concrete object separate from subjective qualia?

V

Back to Malabou: a central concept which Malabou utilizes is that of plasticity, a term Malabou derives from Hegel. A plastic entity is a thing, which is able to be molded not only by an external agent handling it but also by itself, its own activity of self-formation. The latter supposes resistance to forms imposed on it from the outside; in order to form itself through its own activity, the thing can’t be entirely molded by external factors and therefore has at least a minimum capacity of resisting external forces. Plasticity is not polyformism, endless malleability, an infinite flux of forms, since the plastic thing also aims at retaining its identity through temporal changes.

In What Should We Do With Our Brain? Malabou explores the concept of plasticity found in brain science. As is well known by psychologists and brain scientists, the brain is not a fixed organ but goes through constant changes. Perhaps the most radical shifts happen during the early childhood. Infants are born with “incomplete” brains. That is to say, human babies are not born with fully developed brains but their development continues through childhood and adolescence in interaction between the child and his or her environment. As the child ages some synaptic connections are strengthened while others weaken. Learning does not in fact stop in late adolescence but continues throughout the age span of a human being and is of course reflected in the formations taking place in the brain. A third form of brain plasticity is a reparative one: brains are able to fix injuries and the functions taken by certain parts of the brain can be moved to another location. Through all these forms of plasticity human beings shape their own brains; brain plasticity guarantees the historicity of this central organ.

As a fourth form of brain plasticity Malabou suggests the transitional plasticity that provides the link between the neuronal matrix and conscious identity-formation. Malabou goes on to the question of homeostasis, a state of an organism which keeps its identity stable, a state characterized by plasticity. In order to sustain the continuity of itself, an organism needs to keep itself in a homeostatic state. That is to say, it needs to strike a balance between itself and its environment and spend energy on its own maintenance:

The nervous system, like any system, is self-regulated, self-organized, which means that it expends considerable energy in assuring its own maintenance. Basically, in order to preserve itself from destruction, it must keep itself in the same state. Thus it continuously generates and specifies its own organization. (p. 74)

Every force affecting it from the outside necessarily disturbs this homeostatic order and calls for the intentional action from the side of the organism, thus providing it with the capacities of self-generation and resistance to environmental influences. Through this process of resistance the organism gains its identity, or, as Malabou beautifully puts it, “identity resists its own occurrence to the very extent that it forms it”. (p. 74) This is plasticity at work: the organism shapes itself not as a passive object at the mercy of its environment but as resistance to external influence. But the transition from homeostasis to self-generation is not a smooth one:

The ’chain’ that leads from elementary life to the autonomy of a free self, capable not only of integrating the disturbances arriving from the exterior without dissolving itself but also of creating itself out of them, of making its own history, is a movement full of turbulence. Homeostatic energy and self-generating energy are obviously not of the same kind. From this perspective […] one might suppose, at the very core of the undeniable complicity that ties the cerebral to the psychical and the mental, a series of leaps and gaps. (p. 75)

In her later works, such as Ontology of the Accident (2012, orig. 2009), Malabou focuses on the destructive forces of plasticity. It is typical of brain scientists and psychologists alike to celebrate the plasticity of the brain as a positive constructive property. However, plasticity also holds in itself scarier features as Malabou demonstrates. In the above mentioned essay Malabou is trying to conceptualize the loss of identity as a result of the destructive work of plasticity, triggered by trauma, injury or sometimes by no apparent external factor. It is particularly interesting how Malabou conceptualizes the position of a post-traumatic subject. Unlike for Freud, for whom the emotionally indifferent behaviour of the post-traumatic patient is a result of repression of the original trauma, for Malabou, the connection between the post-traumatic subject and the original trauma is cut. The patient’s original identity cannot be retained since the trauma has wiped it out; it has been destroyed by the negative work of the traumatic experience. The indifferent behaviour is not a result of repression (there’s nothing to repress) but rather a state of ahistoricity, discontinuity, the loss of identity and the birth of a new one, appearing out of nowhere.

VI

What emerges out of Malabou’s theory is a kind of negative subjectivity, that is, subjectivity that only persists as a negation of its substantial being. In plasticity the subject not only takes form but also resists it, which means there’s always a possibility of auto-destruction, of purging oneself of substantial content and destroying one’s own form. The subject is not doomed to possess a certain kind of form but there always remains a gap, which allows the subject to distanciate itself from its form. This gap is nothing but the power of the subject to negate being.

One can immediately see how Malabou’s concept of the subject differs from Cartesian conceptions where the subject is a kind of a soul, a mental substance separate from its material substance. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that there is no substantial “self”. The “I”, as a substantial entity, does not exist. This is also the conclusion reached by Thomas Metzinger who argues, in his book The Ego Tunnel (2009), that what we call the “I” or the “self” is an illusion an organism creates for itself. The “I” is nothing but a kind of a virtual entity, a product of the organism’s self-reflective activity, which keeps its identity stable. Metzinger calls this virtual ego the “phenomenal self-model” (PSM).

The PSM could be understood as the representative theory of perception but applied to the subject itself. In perception we are not in direct contact with the object before us. The objects in our perception are always mediated by our perceptive faculties, such as the brain, and therefore the objects in our perceptions are actually representations of the objects we perceive. For example, when I see an apple in front of me the visual image is precisely that, a visual representation of the apple, not the apple as such. Metzinger’s idea is that the same is true when I am conscious of myself. When I think about myself or perceive myself the “self” that I reflect on is just a virtual representation of myself, not really a substantial entity.

Throughout his book Metzinger attempts to describe the functions and features of the PSM. For example, our bodies constitute a significant portion of our PSM. However, as Metzinger demonstrates through all sorts of psychological experiments, our experience of our own body, our representation or the model of our body, does not strictly overlap with our actual physical body. His favored example is the so called rubber hand illusion, where the test subject has the illusion that a rubber hand placed in front of him is a part of his own body. This, according to Metzinger, shows that we can integrate “alien” objects into our body-model. There’s also a psychological condition where the subject does not recognize his actual physical limbs as his own, even though they are actually attached to his physical body.

Zizek has argued against Metzinger in his Parallax View and his recent Hegelian opus Less Than Nothing (2012). As he remarks, Metzinger fails to counter the question: whose illusion the “self” actually is? For whom does the PSM exist? What exactly is the thinking being which creates an illusion of itself for itself? It obviously can’t be the ego, the “I” or the “self”, because we have just denied the existence of such an entity. As Zizek notes, we need to distinguish between the subject of enunciation and the subject of enunciated, that is to say, the subject as a subject and the subject as an object. In my phenomenal self-model I do not appear to myself as a subject but as an object of my conscious reflection.

Can we access the subject as a subject? Zizek quotes Kant from his Critique of Pure Reason:

The simple, and in itself completely empty, representation ‘I’ … we cannot even say that this is a concept, but only that it is a bare consciousness which accompanies all concepts. Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X. It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any judgement upon it has always already made use of its representation. (quoted in Less Than Nothing, p. 721)

In other words, whenever we try to think the subject as a subject, whenever I try to turn my conscious reflection to my own self, we already turn the subject into an object of our conscious reflection. The “I” as a subject remains inaccessible. But here’s the twist: for Zizek this is not some kind of an epistemological obstacle. The “I” does not remain inaccessible to us because of our faulty cognitive faculties but because it is posited as such in our conscious reflection. Whereas Metzinger claims that the “I” does not exist, Zizek claims that the “I” is precisely its own non-being. Or more precisely: the “I” only comes to being as a result of self-reflection, of “self-positing”.

Same thing in different words: the “I” is not a substantial entity but a process. More precisely: it is a process of self-reflecting activity where conscious reflection turns to itself and thus forms itself in this loop of self-reflection. We do not have first an ego equipped with powers of conscious reflection and then subsequently the ego just turns its reflection towards itself in self-reflection. The ego and the self-reflection are one and the same, that is to say, they are two aspects of the same process, which cannot be thought separate from each other.

This process of self-reflection whereby the ego is constituted as the object of (self-)reflection is characterized by Zizek as the failure of self-representation. The failure consists simply in this that the “I” remains forever inaccessible to the thinking subject. Moreover, the subject only emerges through this process of failure of representation. In Zizek’s words: “[A] subject tries to articulate (“express”) itself in a signifying chain, this articulation fails, and by means and through this failure, the subject emerges: the subject is the failure of its signifying representation.” (p. 730)

So, metaphorically speaking, when you have an identity crisis and travel to some lonely mountains for a few months to find yourself by meditative contemplation, it is ultimately an attempt in vain. “Of course!” Metzinger would say, “you couldn’t find yourself because your ‘self’ is just an illusion generated by your own contemplation!” However, you might get a different answer from Zizek, which would go something like this: “Metzinger is right, your attempt to find yourself was doomed to fail. But, in another sense, you did find yourself because your ‘self’ is nothing but your failed search process to find yourself.”

VII

I concluded my paper with a challenge of dialectical materialism and I’m going to do that again. What I mean by dialectical materialism is of course not the orthodox Soviet philosophy bullshit but something quite else. There is a powerful argument against physicalism, which goes like this: physical phenomena can only be explained by other physical phenomena and, therefore, there is no causality between consciousness and the physical realm. Consciousness, experience, etc., become epiphenomenal, that is, phenomena that are completely redundant to physical reality. Therefore physicalism is not a good explanation of consciousness.

Another version of this argument is the zombie one: it cannot be known to us whether other people have a consciousness or not since we cannot directly perceive it. Even if we open up the skull and look directly to the brain, we simply do not see any conscious experience there. It is just plain brain tissue. Therefore we cannot deduce conscious experience from physio-chemical processes taking place in the brain. Again, the point of this argument is to show that consciousness needs to be something else than matter.

In reply to the first argument: it assumes that the physical reality is somehow a harmonious whole where determinism applies. That is, it is assumed that the physical reality is a perfect, completely self-consistent whole where everything follows the mechanical laws of causality. However, this is a very old-fashioned conception of physics, which has been long ago questioned by the new paradigm of quantum mechanics. The physical reality appears, rather, to be indeterministic or, as Zizek puts it nicely, ontologically incomplete. There are gaps and distortions in the physical reality itself, which open up the space for consciousness.

As for the second argument, I’m more and more convinced that it can be undermined by simply asking for whom do other people appear as zombies lacking any conscious experience? It is simply impossible for us to imagine a reality full of mindless zombies, not because it’s difficult to imagine human behaviour as mechanically generated, but because it’s impossible to eradicate our own position from the picture. The subject-object relation is implicitly present in the zombie argument. This further serves to prove that the gap between subject and object cannot be closed but merely held together as a unity of opposites.

The challenge of theorizing dialectical materialism consists in this that we need to conceptualize a material reality, which is indeterministic or, as it were, ontologically incomplete. Moreover, the irreducible gap between subject and object points to a material reality, which is already in itself internally divided. What absolutely has to go is the conception of material reality as a system of external objects in causal relations to each other, devoid of the negative power of subjectivity.